Shalom,
Congratulations again and thank you for making this far. You are now in tip 4. By this time, you should be well aware that you are now taking a big step to host your domain and have it LIVE into a website. I hope tip 3 has answered some of the basic questions and would help you decide on how to choose a domain name for your business.
These are the past tips that we’ve shared. May they be applicable to your needs:
- Tip 1: Identify Your Unique Value Proposition
- Tip 2: Identify Your Target Audience
- Tip 3: Identify Your Domain Name
Every website needs a domain and a web host/server. Just as every bookstore needs a business name and a premises (physical space to sell books), your website needs a domain to serve as your business name and a web host/server to store the services, products, and information of your business.
Here are the basic things I’d personally look into when choosing a web host / server:
- Uptime Reliability: Uptime is a measure of the time a server has been available or working. It is the opposite of downtime. A high uptime means more reliability or stability. Uptime reliability represents the time a server can be left unattended without crashing or needing to be rebooted that is for administrative or maintenance purposes.
- Load time and Cloud Feature: Page load time indicates how long it takes for a page to fully load in the browser after a user clicks a link or makes a request. This is important as it directly impacts the user’s experience and engagement and ultimately your business’s bottom line. There are many factors affecting a page load time, one factor is your server. Though many times a poor load time is caused by how a website is built or designed, it is wise to make sure your server has a good load time. If your server has or can easily integrate with a cloud feature, this is a big plus. The cloud computing feature is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet and can therefore hasten your page load time.
- Customer Support: 2 things I would like to look into when it comes to customer support: the expertise and the politeness. Who wants a knowledgeable, but rude client support; nor will someone want a very polite and courteous support with very poor knowledge on the issues.
- Email Feature: Ability to add unlimited email addresses. Ease and convenience in adding emails in Gmail and third-party mail clients.
- Backup Feature: Check how often they back up, how many back up folders are stored, and for how long are they keeping them. All these are important when you need to restore a backup especially on a very untimely manner.
- HTTPs or SSL: Availability of a free HTTPs or SSL certificate, which will do for most websites.
- Auto-script Installer: Easy to install scripts (like Softaculous) for WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and the like.
- Pricing on both registration and renewal: Check if there are no hidden costs in registration or sign up. Check also if prices do change upon renewal.
- Staging Environment/Feature: This is one feature why I love SiteGround. Your site visitors shouldn’t see the experiments you are making on your website. Worse, if they can see your website break when developing a new feature. The staging environment is a feature every server should have.
- Have you experienced a WP site that breaks after updating theme or plugin? This is one good example why a staging environment is important. By a click of a button, you can copy your site into a staging environment and update the plugin/theme from there. Once everything is fine, you can simply PUSH it back LIVE.
- A Staging environment is also good for experimenting new WP features before having them LIVE.
- If you have an existing website and you plan to make new one, the staging environment can come very handy.
- Note the ease of having a staging feature compared to doing them manually on a subdomain or local computer.
- Caching Feature: Another reason why I love SiteGround. Its caching feature can increase the number of hits a website can handle; it also helps the loading speed of the website.
- Dedicated for WordPress: And since we are to use WordPress for our websites in this series of Internet marketing tutorial, I highly recommend a server and a customer support who knows well about WordPress.
- MediaServe (We are very new to this web host company. However, of all that we’ve tried, this is top-notch. It is supported by a biblically minded family company in business since 1999. Therefore, you are dealing with the business owner and support is great.)
- SiteGround is one of those dedicated to WordPress.
- GreenGeeks is another WordPress optimized hosting. This is a choice for those who opt to go eco-friendly.
My Preference
Start small, then scale up later as needed.
Budget
Around US$10-30/month.
