Web Hosting best practices – Tips to choose the right hosting for your business
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The performance of your website is directly dependent on the kind of hosting you have opted for. It is like the foundation on which the luxurious castle has been built. Stronger the base, solid the build.
If your web host does not deploy ample security measures, your web property would be a sitting duck for hackers who can easily exploit the vulnerabilities, steal data from the website and may cause irrevocable damage to your website as well as your business.
So, let us share a couple of important tips that you should to keep in mind before choosing the hosting services for your online business:
- Shared Hosting service: People often choose shared hosting over a dedicated server because it is economical. Though, they often forget the fact that shared hosting means you are sharing your website with a ton of other sites and a lapse in their security measures may disrupt your website or online business.When you are on a shared hosting, securing your site, updating files and plugins etc. are inconsequential. If the server gets impacted there is a high probability that all the codes hosted on that server will get impacted.
- Unwanted downtimes: If a website on your shared hosting server has been impacted and the host does not have measure to control the malware from spreading to other sites, most likely you’ll have to end up wasting a lot of time cleaning your websites’ code and during that time your website would be down resulting in a loss of business.Going for a managed private server is a no brainer as unlike shared hosting, you always have a skilled person to help you out with the security or hosting related issues. It also means that someone else’s mess-up will not impact your site.
- Resources and scalability: Your hosting provider normally dictates the resources that are available for your website. There is always a hidden policy or a rider that may only get highlighted when you need your website the most.If at any given point in time your website gets a truck load of traffic due to your efforts, your host may not have the option to increase the resources instantly on a shared server. This could easily result in wastage of enormous amounts of time, effort and money. It will always help if you have gone through all the terms and conditions and negotiating with the host, always keep scalability in mind.
Hence it is advisable for businesses to work with a trusted host and always opt for a private server right from the day one of the website going live. Other important tips that you can help you ensure the safety of your website are:
- Offer role-based access to different users. Always keep an eye on the user accounts on the site and raise an alarm the moment you see any unauthorized activity.
- Encrypt traffic with SSL. Even Google prefers websites that have SSL enabled.
- Use a limited number of plugins and remove the unwanted ones. Always verify the developer credentials and refer to user reviews before installing a new plugin. Update plugins and licenses on a timely basis
- Ask your Host to deploy the latest and best security measures as soon as they are available
- Activate malware check and removal tools. Always use monitoring tools to monitor the health of the website
- Keep changing passwords on a regular basis
- Keep taking backups of the website and store them on a different server
All of the above is clearly true. Today, technical specifications are just as important for the successful development of a site as updated content or the presence of comments under articles as an example of user engagement.
I would also add that for any hosting it is very important to evaluate the quality and customer support system. At one time, it was the lack of adequate support from my passed provider that forced me to transfer all sites to the Namecheap.com