Who you choose to host your website or app is a big decision. A great host is secure, offers prompt and detailed customer support, tailors their product to suit your needs, and provides your users with fantastic speed.
A terrible one has the potential to disrupt your business and cause you a world of inconvenience. Here’s what you should keep an eye out for when you’re looking for a server host.
Security
The security of your website or app is going to include a number of factors. But an easy place to stop security risks is at the server level. You want a host who offers a highly secure physical and virtual environment.
There are lots of ways to do this. Part of it is simply securing their datacentre against intruders and guaranteeing against power outages (most server hosts will do this with a diesel generator and some power redundancies).
You’ll also want some technical security for you data, specifically what sort of RAID protection the server host provides for their disks.
RAID protection stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID protection is a way of configuring a collection of disks so that should one fail, the data still retrievable. It’s a nice protection, since disk failure isn’t entirely out of the question. The level of RAID protection ranges (approximately) from RAID 0 to RAID 10, which some other quirky options thrown in there too. It’s easy – the higher the number, the better protected your data is against failure.
Don’t go overboard demanding RAID 10 protection though. For some users (like those servers processing financial transactions) it’s absolutely crucial that your data doesn’t disappear. For others, like a home cook who wants to start a cooking blog, it’s an inconvenience. Match your need with the security level, since more secure levels cost more.
Customer Service
In every single service industry, things go wrong. It happens. And your web or application host is no different. Sometimes, it’s out of their control. Sometimes, it’s sloppy work on the host’s end. A good host will let you know what’s going on and work extremely hard to fix it.
Something to look out for is
how a hosting company corresponds with their customers.
Most will have online chat, phone, and a ticketing system.
A good host will also provide you with ample help setting up your hosting environment, and should be responsive to any specialized requests you have. It’s often worth getting them on the phone just to get a feel for how their service team operates before you lay down any cash.
Flexibility
This is, in our opinion, the most important thing in a hosting company. It’s easy to get totally overwhelmed when you’re looking at the huge variety of hosts out there, and end up thinking that you need more or less than you do.
The most important thing you can look for in a host is one who has the right product for you, and provides lots of freedom to scale.
For example, if you’re just starting out with a small website, a shared hosting solution is going to be fine (that’s where you share your server with other companies and users).
Fast forward three years, and you’ve probably outgrown that shared environment. You’ll want a host who can transition you to a VPS (cloud) server painlessly and with little to no down time.
You’ll also want some flexibility around the add-ons that you get offered. Virtually every single hosting company has loads of free and paid add-ons that they offer their customers. Make sure you can pick and choose instead of being cookie-cut to a specific plan.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce store you’ll probably want a SSL certificate. However, if all your clients are in the Toronto area, then you’re unlikely to really need CloudFlare caching.
You should have the options, so you get a plan that’s perfect for you.
Speed
Finally, speed. For either an app or a website, speed is critical to a good user experience. Some of that
is on you or your developers’ end. But you’ll also need
a good host.
Pick someone with a datacentre close to your customers. If your hosting company has several datacentres, make sure you can pick where your app or website it hosted.
Other things that can improve your speed include:
- How they cache your website
- If your site or app will be hosted on hard disks or the faster Solid State Drives (SSDs)
- How they manage shared server resources (in a shared server environment)
- What percentage of a server’s resources are allocated to each account (in a shared server environment)
You want a host who’s transparent about what they do to improve your speed. You probably won’t need every single one of the above options, but it’s good to have an idea of what’s going to help.
Wrap up
Picking a host is a little about features, but far more about what’s right for
you.
You want a host who’s going to suit your needs both now and in the future, who takes the time to understand what those are, and is flexible in providing a tailored service.
Do you need help choosing the hosting environment that’s right for your website or app? Contact us today.
