What is Quality Web Hosting?

Whether it’s for a personal or a business website, trying to pick out a quality web hosting company from all of the options out there can be quite the challenge, especially if you aren’t sure what you should be looking for. It can be tempting to go with the first company you come across, or the one offering the cheapest web hosting. But neither of these options is really the best way to make your decision. Sure, the first one may be ok and maybe the cheapest option might seem appealing, but you should always do some research before you make your final decision. And if you aren’t really sure what you should be looking for, here are a few key elements to quality web hosting.

Minimal Down Time
If your company`s website is constantly going down and it`s hit or miss for customers who want to purchase goods and services from your site, then it really doesn`t matter what else your web hosting company has to offer you. You want to go with a web hosting company that can guarantee minimal down time. If the company has back up servers that basically guarantee that your site will always be up and running, they`ll be quick to let you know. If the web hosting company doesn`t say anything about down time or avoids your questions, you might want to steer clear of them.

Quick Response Time
If your site does go down, you want to make sure that your web hosting company has a quick response time, preferably 24 hour support. Even if your site only goes down once in a 12 month period, if it`s down for several hours or, even worse, several day, you could end up losing customers and sales. But if the site goes down and within minutes the hosting company can have it back up and running, then you shouldn’t lose any sales.

Strong Customer Support
If you have a question about your web hosting or are interested in changing your package, will it be hard to get a customer service representative on the phone? Does it take them days to answer emails? Is their help department only open during certain hours? A quality web hosting company will offer you support 24/7. They will realize how important your website is to your business and will want to help you as soon as any issues or questions come up.

Enhanced Features
Some companies deal strictly with web hosting. This means that for any kind of enhancements you are out of luck and will need to find them on your own. A quality web hosting company will offer you enhanced features such as security features so that all of your sensitive information will be protected. Without enhanced security features such as SSH, your data could be obtained by a third party. Pre-installed programming languages are also an important enhanced feature since they let you easily handle any programming that your website may need. Even if you won’t be doing any actually programming yourself, your company programmer will have a much easier time doing his or her job with this feature. And even if your website is very basic and there won’t be any additional programming done, a lot of third party applications will still run much smoother with this enhancement.

Trying to choose a quality web hosting company can be a challenge, especially if you’ve never dealt with web hosting before. But by keeping the things mentioned above in mind, you should be able to find a web hosting company that you will be comfortable doing business with.