Choosing a hosting provider for website is a big decision. But many people don’t know its full significance until they encounter problems. The web hosting company you choose can either help or hold back your ranking. The wrong solution can cause big and undetermined damage to your search engine position or search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy without you even knowing it.

Risks of Choosing a Bad Web Host Provider

Once your site is indexed by Google, Yahoo, or Bing, the search engines expect that your site will remain live. When it is down and nowhere to be found, your site can get penalised. If your web hosting provider has unreliable service, you can disappear from the search engine results page (SERP).

If you care about your search engine ranking and your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, it is important to conduct a thorough research about web hosting solutions before signing up. A list of things you need to look into is below:

• Disk Space – there are providers who offer a huge disk space. However, note that if you get this package and you only have a small website, it would be akin to putting a tiny item on a large box. You would be paying for a service that isn’t being used. A 2000-page website usually requires 600MB (depending on the type of files used).

• Bandwidth – websites don’t typically require a large monthly bandwidth but as your website grows, it would require better support. For example, if you receive 3,000 visitors a month, 2.5GB would do. Any less than that and visitors might have a problem with loading your page.

• Instant Backups – even the best web hosting provider will experience some downtime at one time or another, guard against this by choosing a service that provides backup services.

• POP3 Accounts – this service should ideally be customisable depending on the needs of your company. Web hosts that have the capability to handle 1,000 mail boxes are expensive but small business are not likely to use even 1/10th of that capacity. Make sure that you choose a provider that offers reasonable service at a decent price.

• 24/7 Customer Service – you’re probably heard this before but the importance of good support services cannot be emphasised enough. Hosting companies should be able to respond in a timely manner because a lot of transactions are being handled on the World Wide Web.

A web hosting company that can provide advice on the best package for you is ideal, especially if you are new to website development. Make sure to go through the features of the service before subscribing to any hosting solution.