Is your web hosting package still the right fit for the job your website is doing? You want and deserve a website that can move your business safely and securely in the right direction. What you really don’t want is to find that your hosting setup is leaving your website chugging along in the slow lane.
This is where choosing the right hosting setup matters. At 4UHosting, our hosting plans are designed to cover most common website needs and you can upgrade or downgrade as your site changes. For busier or more demanding websites, a managed cloud server may also be worth considering.
So, here are the features of your website to check, to make sure that your web hosting package still has enough power under the bonnet.
Speed
Load time is a real issue for websites. Customers get bored when pages take too long to load and a slow website can quickly turn interest into frustration.
The more popular your website becomes and the more customers you attract to it, the greater the burden will be on the servers hosting your website. It is a good problem to have, but a terrible waste if those new customers get put off by slow loading times and leave.
There are plenty of ways to improve site speed, from optimising images to reviewing plugins, caching and the structure of the site itself. Having the right hosting plan behind you will reduce the need for constant firefighting and make those optimisation steps more effective when you do take them.
Reliability
You need to have confidence that your website will be online whenever your customers want it. You do not want to get the reputation that your online shop shuts or that there are high-traffic times that are best avoided.
If your hosting company is bumping along with out-of-date technology or software, that can affect the reliability of the websites they host. Maintenance and updates are part of running any hosting platform, but regular downtime or unexplained errors are a sign that something needs to be reviewed.
For a business website, reliability is not a luxury. If the site is bringing in enquiries, taking bookings or supporting sales, it needs hosting that is able to keep up. Sometimes that means moving up to a larger plan; sometimes it simply means checking that the site is on the most suitable package for the way it is being used.
Security
Security is, arguably, the single most important issue facing an online business. No business is immune to cyber security threats and if your web hosting provider is not paying attention, criminals can find their way into your system and do untold damage to your business and your reputation.
Your hosting should support the basics properly: secure server software, sensible account isolation, SSL certificates, firewalls, malware scanning, backups and the ability to respond quickly if something does go wrong.
Security is never just one product or one setting. It is a mixture of good hosting, well-maintained website software, strong passwords, regular updates and proper backups.
Storage
Size matters.
Most websites start out relatively small but, if you are running an online shop, you will be posting lots of product images, possibly videos and creating more pages. As your business grows and the traffic flows, your website will evolve and expand, so you need to be sure that your hosting provider gives your site the room it needs for your business to scale up.
Do you need to move to bigger online premises?
That does not always mean choosing the biggest plan available. It means choosing a hosting package that fits the website you have now, with a sensible route to upgrade if the site keeps growing or downgrade if your needs become simpler later on.
You can view our current hosting plans here: https://www.4uhosting.co.uk/web-hosting