There’s a lot to take into consideration when choosing a good host for your website. Here are a few pointers on what to look out for.
Your Needs and Technical Expertise
When choosing a hosting provider, it’s important to find one that meets your specific needs. Since every individual and website has unique requirements, the best host for one site may not be the best fit for another.
Building the Site
Will you be installing and creating the site yourself? Do you enjoy solving technical challenges? Would you prefer to build the site yourself but have good support in case you need it? How complicated will the site be? Do you need e-commerce for instance? Are budget constraints driving the decision to build the site yourself? Do you have a theme in mind?
Future Maintenance
How much involvement would you like in the future to maintain your site and all its plugins and themes? Does the site contain any personal user data that needs protecting? How concerned are you about your site’s security? Are you able to commit to working on things such as SEO and content frequently? Do you care about possible downtime when things such as automated updates (many hosting providers have this now) break?
All of these things decide what kind of hosting service is right for you. We serve a variety of customers from do-it-yourselfers all the way up to fully managed Webmaster services.
DNS Protection
Good security starts before visitors even reach your website. You’re going to want something awesome like Cloudflare for your nameservers and their firewall stops malicious bots and visitors before they can even reach your server.
Server firewalls or web access firewalls also stop malicious users but by then they’ve already reached your site and gained valuable information about your setup. Most premium hosts have great DNS protection (usually through Cloudflare) as standard.
Read more about how we handle DNS protection.
Cloud-based Servers
Servers in the cloud just make sense. They are faster (assuming they’re sized correctly), more secure and grow with your needs.
Long gone are the days of company websites floating around on a desktop server at the office. You want web hosting that can easily scale up or down depending on your needs.
If your site is critical, you want redundancy (multiple servers that can serve your site if one of the servers goes down). You also want your servers as near to your customer’s physical location as possible.
Cloud server service providers such as UpCloud, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform have data centers all over the world, allowing your site to be served as quickly as possible from the nearest server to your customers.
Read more about our hosting and data center locations.
Solid Backup System
You want a system you can easily restore backups from and quickly too. Regular hosting has backups once a day and they’re stored on the same server as your website. If your site goes down, it’s pretty common for all your backups to go at the same time.
Premium hosting providers such as Kinsta have an awesome backup system that quickly restores your site to working condition, so you can easily try changes and if something goes wrong, you can quickly repair it.
Read more about how we handle backups.
WordPress Development
Oftentimes your hosting and development team are separate unless you have a contract with a development company that manages your hosting as well.
Most premium WordPress hosting companies have great support but draw the line at actually completing coding tasks and helping you with technical challenges such as setting up WooCommerce etc.
You should think about how your site will look in the future as well. Will it possibly need some custom post types when you have a lot of content? or some CSS changes to make it look more to your own taste? You may eventually want a completely custom theme, just for your brand. It’d be good if you could get it all from one place.
We offer our customers and resellers complete webmaster services from small theme CSS updates all the way up to custom applications and plugins, so you always have a dev team at hand when you want to improve your site. Our monthly reports also include suggestions and actual steps you can take to improve the technical quality of your site which we also help with.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this has given you a few pointers on what you need to think about and decide when planning your website. Contact us if you’d like us to assess your needs, we’d be happy to help you find the right solution.
