The practices you adopt for your website considerably impacts the revenue your business generates. It’s the same for web hosting as well. But how will you choose one host from among thousands of others? That decision will consequentially play a role in your business’ revenue generation from its website.

About Hosting Value

A technical genius can even make use of poorly built infrastructures to become successful. You can’t judge the value of a host just because you feel like you are getting what you are paying for, and that it’s reasonable. You need to be aware of the success/failure rates of the following factors:

• Performance
  
• Security
  
• Reliability
  
• Scalability
  
• Support
  

There is a significant difference between the challenges you face while walking into a store and online purchase. Assessing the quality is easy when you can touch and feel the goods, and converse with the shop keeper. When it comes to shopping online, investigating the quality of the goods you plan to buy isn’t easy. You can only believe what they are saying about the product.  

When it comes to hosting, you should be aware that there are a lot of ways for someone to build a simple server, data center etc. When you feel like everything is working the way they should, you won’t bother about how they are doing it. But there is still a notable difference between a great hosting service and a good one.

For any hosting service you purchase, you should question. How does a 0.5 seconds or 1.5 seconds delay in loading an advertisement affect the views for your business? How a delay in a video buffer affects the conversion to your sale (depending on the viewer)? How it affects your revenue when your site goes offline for an hour a month? How much does it affect your business if your website responsiveness considerably decreases at a particular time period every day or one day a month? How much is an uptime worth to you? How fast can you get the issues resolved by the tech support team?

These are just a few of the many questions that you shouldn’t shy away from asking. The more you ask, the more you know. A perfect host is farfetched. If you know how to inspect like this, you can find a great hosting provider in no time. 

Performance

To assess the prospective host’s performance capabilities, you need to do a lot of research and most likely will have to go by your instincts. Go through reviews, contact people who use the service, check the load time of websites hosted by the subject in question yourself etc. are just a few things you can do. Better the performance, more the revenue. That’s a fact.

Security

Poor security can pretty much kill your business as well as your business relationships. It can harm your clients and may even give you trouble from the authorities. A reputed web host might have a number of effective security practices, but these can’t completely nullify the possibilities of a security breach. You needn’t be an expert, but you should have experts at your beck and call to resolve issues as soon as possible, just in case.

Reliability

There are reliability tiers for data center construction, and each tier costs almost twice the cost of the previous tier to construct. You should be aware of how you can withstand an occasional downtime or outages. Downtime can affect you in different ways depending on your business. 

For example, downtime can badly affect an advertising network. Figure out your core values, how much loss you can take and what it is worth to you. Then you will find it easier to spot a web host compatible with your core values and requirements. 

Scalability

Any business, in its lifespan, can grow or shrink depending on various circumstances and challenges. How quickly the host can adapt to that change, provide more features or remove existing ones (if your business shrinks), can make a significant difference. 

You should also inquire how fast they can do it, the upfront costs (if any), contractual terms etc. You should also have an idea of their present network infrastructure, rack space, available servers etc. 

Support

You will be definitely requiring technical assistance more frequently than you think. A lot can happen to a hosted website. If you are using a fairly large database and lots of quick loading webpages, you will require advanced technical support over your business’ lifespan. In addition to that, running backups, security audits, installing scripts etc. may require support as well depending on the size of your business. 

Late support can harm your business as well. It affects performance and in turn affects the revenue. Feel free to ask them all the questions that come to your mind regarding support.