It’s common knowledge that a few expenses are associated with running any business. While it’s a much smaller investment to open an online business instead of a traditional brick-and-mortar store, there are still a few tools that you’ll need to have available to get you up and running. One tool that is an absolute must-have is quality web hosting.
Unfortunately, there can be a bit of confusion regarding knowing how to find the best web hosting companies and what you should be looking for when trying to select the best options for you and your business.
In this guide, we’ll look at why quality web hosting is essential, how to find the best options for your needs, and even cover a few of my top recommendations depending on your business’s needs.
What Is Web Hosting Anyway?
Before we start discussing what features you should look for in a quality hosting company, you must understand exactly what web hosting is.
In short, web hosting is the actual location where your online business resides. One way to look at it is to think about your web hosting company as a physical location.
In a traditional brick-and-mortar store, you have an address, but you also have a building that exists at that address and houses your store and inventory while giving you a place to conduct your day-to-day business.
Regarding an online business, your web hosting serves as the building where your website exists and allows you to make sales and deliver information to your audience.
How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for Your Needs
Now, do you have a bit of an understanding of what web hosting is? Let’s talk more about what you should look for to find the best web hosting option available to you.
I will try to keep this as non-technical as possible to avoid more confusion than necessary. While you can shop around for things such as CPU cores, CPU speed, RAM, and much more, this guide is intended to serve as more of a company selection tool rather than a guide to understanding server hardware.
Shared or Dedicated Hosting
You must first decide whether you want sharing or dedicated hosting. If you’re a beginner, shared hosting will be more than enough to handle your online business’s needs. As your site grows and you receive substantial traffic, you can then begin to consider dedicated hosting options.
Access to Customer Service
When running an online business, you won’t have too many issues you have to deal with on the server-side of things. However, when issues do arise, they can become very technical very quickly.
For this reason, you must select a web hosting company that is available when you need them. Look for options with 24-hour ticket support or, even better, 24-hour phone support.
Uptime Scores
Perhaps the most important thing to consider when selecting a good web hosting company is their uptime scores. If possible, try to look for companies that have uptime scores above 99.5% and strive to avoid companies that report annual uptime scores below 99%.
Remember that anytime your web hosting servers are offline, your website is as well and can’t earn you any money. Also, search engines can penalize sites if they find that your site is frequently off-line when the robots attempt to crawl it.
Security
Two things that can bring your online business to its knees are hackers and infected files showing up on your site. Therefore, it’s essential to look for hosting companies with a proven track record for security to prevent malicious activity and DDOS attacks. Site attacks are uncommon, but having a robust security system behind your site is crucial to your overall success.
Site Backups
When things go wrong, you need to make sure that you can have your online business back up and running as quickly as possible. Whether you make a mistake and damage your site beyond repair or your security options failed to stop issues before the damage is done, having a recent backup can save you a significant amount of time should the need to use it come up.
Not only is it essential that your web hosting company backs your site up regularly, but it’s also important to know you can access the files when needed.
Hidden Costs and Renewal Fees
If you’re reading this article, you’ve most likely looked around the few hosting companies already. You’re probably all too familiar with many of them offering prices that seem to be very inexpensive.
Be careful when you register with a web hosting company as some advertised prices of $1 to $3 per month, but after reading the fine print, you discover the cost to only be that inexpensive the first few months, and then it may jump to $10, $25 or more.
Scalability
As your online business receives more traffic, you will need more power from your web hosting provider. Make sure when shopping around that you can increase the power of your hosting without too much difficulty. Some hosting providers even offer to move your site to larger servers when the time comes for free.
Now that you understand what you should be looking for when choosing the best web hosting provider for your needs, let’s look at some of the ones I considered to be great choices to launch your online business with.
Top Web Hosting Companies
#1 – Wealthy Affiliate
At the beginning of this article, I briefly mentioned that running an online business requires certain tools, just like running a traditional brick-and-mortar store. While many hosting companies simply provide you with web hosting, Wealthy Affiliate takes all the tools you need to successfully run an online business and bundles them into one easy-to-consume package.
Not only does Wealthy Affiliate deliver exceptional speed and server reliability, but they also manage your hosting for you, which frees you up to focus more on providing content to your audience and building your business.
They follow hosting management up by providing 24-hour support via live ticket, and the few times I’ve run into issues, they’ve had my site back up and running in just a few hours.
Best of all, you have access to their online business training, community, and access to tools like the Jaaxy keyword research tool.
While Wealthy Affiliate may be a little more expensive than other options for web hosting, it’s very convenient to have all the tools needed for running a successful online business in one place rather than scattered across multiple accounts.
If you’d like to have a look around at what they have to offer, you can sign up for free through this link.
#2 – Bluehost
If you’re just looking for reliable web hosting with excellent customer support, look no further than Bluehost. They boast impressive uptimes of 99.99% and easy-to-access customer service through live chat and phone.
Just make sure you’re paying attention when you sign up, as they offer a very low introductory rate that does increase when it comes time to renew your service.
Even after the price increase, though, it’s still one of the most affordable options for web hosting that offers impressive security and support when needed.
#3 – Hostgator Cloud Hosting
Many web hosting packages have both bandwidth and storage limitations. This isn’t the case with HostGator Cloud Hosting. With 99.98% uptime, this hosting company is reliable, and when things go south, you can always reach them via live chat or phone.
As with Bluehost, just be certain to pay attention to the fine print as their entry prices do take a steeper jump on renewal than many others.
Final Thoughts on the Best Web Hosting Companies
Hopefully, after reading this quick guide, you better understand how to select the best web hosting companies for your online business’s needs.
If you still find yourself a little confused, please feel free to leave any of your questions or comments in the comments area below this post.
Also, be sure to check out some of our other content to learn more about how you can begin to generate a full-time income as quickly as possible with your online business.
A and exciting blog post-Sonia I too am a WA Member and could probably rant on for an hour and 50 reasons why it is better but I won’t LOL.
I have used most of the big names in hosting and can say I save money with WA not because it is cheaper but because I save myself hours of hassle chasing hosting companies with sub standard services.
I agree with you, other Web Hosting companies are more expensive than Wealthy Affiliate, and you get much less!
Also, based on an experience that I had with one very popular Web Hosting provider, the customer support is sub-standard when compared to the support offered by Wealthy Affiliate.
I find that web hosting is critical when it comes to owning an online business. Since web hosting is like the office space, if you will, of an offline business, so, you must choose your hosting company wisely to avoid any surprises down the lines!
Why did Wealthy Affiliate come first on your list? Hostgator is kind of new to me, and I have not tried it before. Thank you.
Both HostGator Cloud Hosting and Bluehost are excellent companies; however, they ONLY offer web hosting to their customers.
If you are starting an online business, you will need more. This is why Wealthy Affiliate ranked first in my post! As they provide all the necessary marketing tools to build your online business. Check out my Wealthy Affiliate review to learn more about the platform.
I love your explanation of what a web hosting company does in non-technical terms. I, too, happen to be with Wealthy Affiliate.
I love the fact that their prices stay stable and are even discounted on Black Friday – rather than the steep increase that most of these companies have.
As I am relatively new, tech support is vital to me, and I don’t think that I’ve had an issue that hasn’t been fixed within half an hour. I can’t say enough good things about their hosting services or their platform. It’s great to be able to focus on my business and leave the techy stuff to the pros!
I utterly agree with you! With the Wealthy Affiliate Platform, you can focus on creating content and growing your online business because you know that all the technical stuff is taking care of by Wealthy Affiliate!
In your comparison of the three hosting companies, do the other two companies offer the Online Certification Courses (50 courses), Affiliate Bootcamp (70 courses), and Weekly Live Events like Wealthy Affiliate does?
The level of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a customer may choose. Wealthy Affiliate takes security very seriously. Are the other hosting companies just as secure?
No, the HostGator Cloud Hosting and Bluehost don’t offer affiliate marketing training courses, only web hosting.
As for security, both HostGator and Bluehost provide a very secure environment for hosting your website.
Lastly, if you want to start an online business, you will need more than web hosting! Therefore, you should join the Wealthy Affiliate platform, which offers all the affiliate tools required to build and grow a thriving online business. Click here to read about the Wealthy Affiliate platform.
Thank you for your post. I started a while back in an online business. I have been searching for website hosting for some time now.
I am so happy to see that you report that Wealthy Affiliate is the best one. Your conclusion is the same as mine. I am already a customer of Wealthy Affiliate. So far, I am pleased with their service, and the uptime is close to 100%.
With my previous hosting company, once my website was down for one week, and all my customers have left me, which is the reason why I left the hosting company in question, horrible customer support!
Besides web hosting, Wealthy Affiliate also provides a lot of free services on all blog associated tasks. I am certainly going to stick with them for the foreseeable future.
It is kind of you sharing this useful information with us, and many people who look for web hosting will find your article valuable.
I am sorry to hear about your previous experience with web hosting. Often time when you are just starting in the affiliate marketing space, you don’t know what to look for or what is important when it comes to web hosting.
The uptime score is paramount for any website based online business. Moreover, customer service is of the uppermost importance, in my opinion, and your previous web hosting company was undoubtedly deficient in both areas!
A very brilliant article. I am never under the assumption that I know everything. I have this attitude always to try to find a new thing that will take away from my comfort zone. I am not an expert on the topic; neither am I a newbie.
Here’s one thing that I am taking away from this article… It is the need to check hosting companies’ uptime score for their service. I never knew that.
The question is, do you have a resource website in mind where I can check uptime score?
Thanks for sharing.
There are many websites available throughout the internet where you can check your uptime score or website availability. Most of the sites are paid sites, but most of them offer free trials. Such websites include Pingdom, Site24x7, and Service Uptime, to only name a few. However, I found a free resources for checking the availability of your website and it’s called IsItWP.
I hope it helps. If you have more questions about web hosting companies or affiliate marketing in general, drop me a line below, I will gladly help you out.