Choosing a Website Hosting Provider? Here Are 8 Important Considerations

We get it, it’s confusing.

Website hosting looks like a commodity; they’re all about the same, but one company charges $25 a month and another charges $400. Both website hosting providers promise fast and secure websites.

So, what’s the difference? What are you actually paying for?

If you own and operate a personal blog or a small “brochure” website, $25 hosting is probably just right. It is small and uncomplicated; the information isn’t the kind to be stolen, and if it goes down for a day, your life or business won’t end.

But . . . if you have a website that generates revenue, accepts donations, supports members, collects customer information, or if the website is absolutely vital to the organization, hosting needs to be taken very seriously.

And that means you need to choose a website hosting provider based on a few things well beyond price alone.

Here are the top eight things to consider before making the important decision of choosing your next website hosting provider.

1. Who Is Watching Your Website?

There is a significant difference between having your website sit on a server somewhere and having a trusted expert actively monitoring it.

A managed hosting provider will be watching for outages, performance issues, or unusual activity. When considering your choice, ask what is being monitored, how often, and then what is the order of events and timeframe for when something goes wrong?

You don’t want your customers or members to be the first people to discover that your website has some serious issues.

A reputable managed hosting provider will quickly identify the problem, determine its severity and cause, and immediately take the necessary steps to stabilize the website and permanently fix the problem. This ideally occurs before any one of your customers or members knows about the problem.

2. What Does “Secure Hosting” Really Mean?

Every hosting company promises security. The biggest difference in price is how much active protection and human involvement you are receiving.

With a cheaper plan, the security is mostly automated, and while the server itself is secured, your website can have vulnerabilities (like plugins) which can be compromised, and for which your host is not watching or taking responsibility. You may be responsible for discovering these issues and fixing them.

A managed hosting environment gets you a hearty security plan of continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning, patch management, malware detection, strong backup and recovery procedures, and experienced engineers who monitor, investigate, and respond as necessary.

3. How Good Is the Backup Plan?

Most hosting comes with a backup. That’s good, but what does that truly mean?

You should ask your website hosting provider a few key questions: “How often do these backups occur?” “How long are your backups retained?” “Where are they stored and how quickly can they be accessed if needed?”

A strong hosting plan should include offsite backups. If something has gone horribly wrong in the primary hosting environment, you certainly don’t want your “safe” backup sitting in the same space.

4. What Happens after Business Hours?

Websites are a bit like children; they have the annoying habit of breaking at inconvenient times.

If a problem occurs at 2:00 a.m. or during an important conference being held on a Saturday or just after your big fundraising campaign starts, will somebody be available and “on the problem” when it’s truly needed?

When looking for your next website hosting provider, ask them whether monitoring and support are truly available 24/7/365, and what steps are taken when an urgent issue is detected.

5. Who Actually Helps You When Something Goes Wrong?

People are the difference between cheap hosting and professionally managed hosting. When your website has an issue, is your team talking to a known and experienced engineer or simply submitting a ticket to a support queue?

Having a relationship with a person who knows your website is not only deeply comforting, but is the best way to find the problem quickly and fix it.

The difference also becomes apparent when the problem involves more than simply restarting a server. Modern websites are complicated and depend on content management systems, databases, plugins, APIs, integrations, caching, DNS, security tools, and third-party services. Finding the source of a problem often requires someone who deeply understands how those pieces work together.

6. How Will Hosting Affect Website Performance?

A slow website isn’t just frustrating for your visitors; it can affect search rankings and perception. As we all get used to lightning-fast responses, anything less than that can also affect conversions such as sales, donations, and registrations.

Cheap hosting can affect your website speed because in that scenario your website is sharing server resources with a large number of other websites. If another website on the same server experiences heavy traffic, that can affect your website’s performance; this is sometimes called the “noisy neighbor” problem.

Good hosting includes sufficient computing resources to keep your web pages loading quickly, and at all times.

Ask potential hosting providers how they deal with sudden increases in traffic. A serious hosting environment should be able to provide additional resources when they’re needed rather than allowing success to bring your website to a halt.

7. Are There Development and Staging Environments?

You shouldn’t have to experiment on your live website.

Professional hosting typically includes separate environments for development, testing, and production. That allows developers to test software updates, integrations, new functionality, and other changes before they reach the public website.

It may not be the most exciting hosting feature, but you’ll appreciate it the first time an update doesn’t behave as expected.

8. What Could Downtime Actually Cost You?

The most important question on this list is a self-directed one. What would downtime or a loss of information do to our organization?

Yes, the cost of website hosting is a factor, and a professional managed hosting package will likely be hundreds of dollars more than a cheap one. But what will you lose if something goes wrong?

How many sales, donations, registrations, leads, or member interactions could be lost? How much staff time would be spent dealing with the problem? What would happen to customer confidence? And what would the consequences be if the problem weren’t simply downtime, but a security breach or loss of data?

Once you start looking at hosting in terms of business risk rather than monthly price, the calculation changes considerably.

You Get What You Pay For

Cheap website hosting exists because there is a market for it, and for plenty of websites, it’s perfectly fine.

But serious organizations usually need more.

They need monitoring, security, backups, redundancy, performance management, development environments, knowledgeable engineers, and someone who takes responsibility when something goes wrong.

New Target provides managed website hosting, including 24/7/365 monitoring and support, application and network firewalls, onsite and offsite backups, encryption, separate development environments, and ongoing performance monitoring.

When you’re comparing website hosting providers, don’t just ask how much space, bandwidth, or computing power you’re getting for the money. Ask a more important question: What are we trusting this company to protect? Contact us, we can help.