The Top 10 Hosting Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Why the Web Host You Select is So Important
But let’s first take a bit of time and remind ourselves why website hosting is so important to the success of your site.
Reliability in hosting is such an important factor that it warrants discussion on its own.
Every website is built on the foundation of its hosting provider and this is where things are decided. When your host does not meet the standards relating to speed, uptime and security of your website, your online experience will be slow. Your visitors will be angry, search engines will demote your site, and your site may freeze or slow down at the crucial moment. Hence, it becomes crucial for your site’s effectiveness and success that you find the right host.
It is When People Select the Lowest Price, But Not Quality
We get it. When I look at it from that perspective, one of the major challenges every website owner faces is the issue of finance. However, going for the cheapest hosting provider to work with may disappoint you in the long run. Although some hosts may come cheap there are always certain losses they make in areas that should be covered, such as availability, support and security. You land up with a slow website, or downtimes or worse still, a security breach that ends up costing you far more than an admittedly more expensive reliable host.
What to do instead: Select a web host that provides optimal value with reasonable price. Don’t concentrate only on the price, but look instead at the features, the uptime guarantee, and the testimonials.
Overlooking Uptime Guarantees
Your website must be open round the clock to the visitors it hosts. Any interruption can be costly in terms of lost potential and readers/customers, lost revenue, and a potential hit in your SEO standings for even a few minutes. While most hosting providers provide uptime guarantees you may fail to review them, and this makes your hosting service very poor.
What to do instead: It’s always important to select your host that gives a minimum of 99.9% uptime guarantee. Less than that, and you could be experiencing more down time than you are willing to deal with.
Not Measuring Website Performance, Website Speed
Slow site equals to a frustrated site. Long loading times are strongly associated with longer time to interact with the site thus high bounce rates and even poor SERP rankings. Your hosting provider has a great part to play in making sure your website loads quickly.
What to do instead: To reduce your hosting provider’s effects on your website’s performance, test them first before signing up. Find one that has strong infrastructure, fast servers and content delivery networks (CDNs) with quick page load across the world.
Not Considering Customer Support
If something goes wrong with a hosting, then what is the possible outcome or experience you will get? Many a time you will want to be able to talk to someone and ensure the problem is worked on. Perhaps one of the more overlooked aspects of a hosting provider is that of its customer support increasing the gains, many website owners fail to consider it.
What to do instead: Select a host that has 24/7 technical support whether online, through email or phone. Ensure that they are contactable with good working relationship with the public or with anybody they interact with.
Lack of evaluation of the security features
While it is an old term, cybersecurity remains crucial and more indispensable than ever before. If you are not so keen on security you might find your website an easy target for attacks. This applies to some basic functionalities inclusive of firewalls, DDoS, and malware scanning if you are selling products online, or if your site includes confidential information.
What to do instead: Ensure your host provider performs a conscientious job guarding your website through providing up-to-date SSL certification, firewalls, daily backups, and constant lookout for threats.
Tips to Remembering to Backup Your Website Regularly
Picture yourself one day and you don’t have any of the information that pertains to your website. This could be a reality if there were no backups in the first place. Most hosts do provide backup services but often it goes unnoticed or people think that it already comes with the package. This is a cloud hosting service alerting the owner of a website to perform a backup of the site to protect against loss of data.
What to do instead: Backup your website either through your hosts or from other online services providers Backup your website either through your hosts or from other online services providers Make sure that your host offers proper data ensured and dependable backup services.
Picking the Wrong Type of Hosting for Your Site
There are various hosting which one could consider, and includes shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting. Both have their advantages and disadvantages depending upon the requirements of your web site. One common mistake made by many website owners is in choosing the wrong type – which may decrease the site’s performance, or increase the expenses unnecessarily.
What to do instead: Section V emphasized the decision on the hosting plan in accordance to the nature of the site. Some of them are; If you have a small blog, shared hosting might work. If you are managing a large online shop; then you will require something more robust than shared hosting like, VPS, or dedicated hosting.
Underestimating Scalability
What will happen should your website expand and you begin receiving more visitors? To do this, you will need a hosting solution that is scalable and will be suitable to your current size as well as the much larger organization that it will one day become. Failure to think about scale can make your site unusable or extremely sluggish at the wrong time, for instance, at peak usage.
What to do instead: Always consider a host that can be able to provide solutions that will allow clients to upgrade their host services when the need arises. Cloud hosting is good for sites, which may have variable traffic at some periods of time.
In this case we have the following headlines: Not Reading the Fine Print in Terms and Conditions
The tendency, however, is to ignore either or both and this leaves the users with additional charges, long subscription periods or restricted service! Unfortunately, most hosts have very stringent conditions which even the host might not be aware of untill you sign up with them.
What to do instead: Always read the fine print. Be sure to tackle and focus on and the duration of the contract and fees charged for renewal; restrictions concerning the access to the fundamental service components such as bandwidth and storage space.
Ignoring the Need for an SSL Certificate
For a site to be secure and safe for its user, an SSL certificate should be acquired. It’s also important for SEO. Without it your site can look rather suspicious to a visitor and you may get a penalty from Google and other major search engines.
What to do instead: Check that with your hosting provider at least SSL is provided or is sold for a reasonable price. When it comes to dealing with payments or personal information it is crucial to have an SSL.
Conclusion
Selecting the right hosting partner is the key to your success, and this includes the performance, and security of the website you wish to host. Now that we’ve looked at 10 hosting mistakes to avoid, you can be sure that your website will function, be protected and useful and user-friendly for anyone who visits it. By being more precise with value, uptime, speed, security, and customer support you’re going to be able to make choices that will eventually benefit you in the long-term.
FAQs
Which criteria are most important to consider for a hosting provider?
Reliability and speed take the highest priority since Data is often accessed frequently and directly affects user engagement and search engine rank.
Is it important to choose a secure hosting?
Be sure the site has components such as SSL certificates, DDoS protection, daily backup, and threat detection in advance.
Which kind of hosting is good for an e-commerce site?
While, VPS or dedicated hosting is said to be the most suited for e-commerce websites since they take more resources as well as security.
Do I really need customer support available at any time of the day from my host provider?
Yes for the fact that now you have personnel who are always on standby to help you solve any problems that come up at any time.
Is it okay for me to change providers if I am unhappy with the service that i am getting?
Yes, most providers let you switch to a different plan or hosting provider, but, of course, it is always unpleasing to switch, so it’s advisable to select the right plan right from the start.