If you’re running a business online, is important to chose the right web hosting. Choosing a good web hosting is a lot harder than you think. All hosting companies would say they provide the best service to their users and there are services that even offer dedicated hosting for your sites. But if you follow the small business guide to SEO & online marketing, you will know that there is more to a hosting than what they call small business. Check below for what to consider:

1. Unavailable If your web hosting company is not available then you would have to look for a backup option. Your backup provider is usually a local backup service. For instance, VPS in India or backups in US.

2. Unproven Ask your family, friends or relatives. They may be business savvy and know how to read a balance sheet or financial statements. If they don’t have access to these, get them.

3. Unscrupulous Look for a reputable hosting provider that is reliable. Choose a provider that has real reviews from real customers. Review websites and service online. Read the terms and conditions and compare costs and charges for your choice. Compare prices on different hosting providers and see how much money you can save.

4. Spam or Data Theft If you will be hosting any websites, make sure the hosting service will never contact you by email or sms. No junk emails, unwanted emails or excessive marketing messages. Make sure they don’t store any log files, any cookies, any session cookie, any web bugs and any data from your website.

5. Latency Do not make your site inaccessible on days of heavy internet traffic. Latency is also called the delay in transmission. It shows how far it takes to send a message from one point to another. Latency affects speed and delivery.

6. Lack of Security Ask your hosting provider to put the website on a secure server. Ask them to use SSL encryption. SSL encrypts your connection to the web server. For an attacker to access your site, he would have to get access to your website using your web server. So get your website ready with an SSL encryption certificate.

7. Long Distance Make sure you will be able to access your website from abroad. Choose a service with a huge range of server locations. Make sure they have direct access to the data center from where you will be taking your website. Also make sure that the servers you select have a high ping and very high download speed to ensure the best performance of your website.

8. No Security Guarantee It is highly recommended to have a refund policy with your hosting provider. However, your hosting provider should give you a full refund for any reason. However, there are cases where no refund is given after several days or the site is shutdown. If you think the way they handle your money is not enough, you should consider looking for a different provider.

9. Other Costs Some hosting providers charge you for things like email, remote support, web hosting premium account and most popular discounts such as shared hosting and etc.

Now that you know how important it is to choose a good web hosting provider, let us know which is the best for small businesses!

Best Small Business Hosting Online