05 April 2022

What to consider when choosing your Web Hosting Provider

Submitted by: Domains.co.za Johannesburg
What to consider when choosing your Web Hosting Provider

Website hosting is the most important foundation of every website, it may seem less important as a “back-end” feature, than what is happening on the “front-end”, but it certainly is not. The hosting you choose will directly influence your website’s performance online. If you’ve chosen incorrectly, it won’t matter that you have an incredibly optimised, user-friendly website because it simply won’t function properly.

Here are the top things to consider for your Web Hosting:

1. Server Reliability

You want your website to be live and fully functional all the time because any downtime will mean damage to your reputation, less leads and less sales. Also, did you know search engines are not fond of weak servers? This means your ranking may be affected as well.

Investigate:- What guarantees are offered with regards to up-time?- Where are servers located?- What hardware and software are the provider making use of?

At Domains.co.za our web hosting comes with a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee SLA. All our servers are hosted in a highly secure, N+1 Redundant Data Centre in Johannesburg boasting carrier-grade network infrastructure. Domains.co.za is also one of the only geo-redundant domain name server (DNS) providers in the country, which means downtime due to power outages, or issues affecting a specific city or country, won’t affect your hosting with us.

2. Speed

Another thing Google doesn’t like is any site that takes too long to load, because its algorithms have been set to mimic what consumers don’t appreciate. If a site takes more than 2 seconds to load, bounce rates go up by 103%

Investigate:- What kind of servers are used and how do they compare when it comes to loading speeds?- Where is the company based?

At Domains.co.za, we make use of LiteSpeed on our state of the art web servers and SuperFast Enterprise SSD drives and servers to ensure that our customers experience the fastest loading speeds possible.

We are based in South Africa and our servers are in Johannesburg, which means sites hosted with us will load far quicker in local searches compared to websites hosted on overseas servers.

3. Features and Freebies

While freebies may be alluring, focus on the features that matter the most first.

Investigate:- Does the hoster provide 1-Click Easy Installs?- How much storage and email addresses are included?- What kind of security measures are in place?

At Domains.co.za all our web hosting packages offer 1-Click Easy Installs, scalable storage, email addresses, unlimited traffic, and all our packages are IPv6 Ready.

Furthermore, we include a free domain name, free SSL certificate, free daily backups, 24/7 monitoring, malware scanning and SPAM and virus protection.

4. Scalability

You’ve got big plans for your business, so ensure you are hosting with a company that can accommodate your growth.

Investigate:- What kind of packages are offered?- Is there room for scalability?- How do the various package upgrades compare in price?

At Domains.co.za, each of our five different types of hosting offer at least four different packages to allow for the streamlined growth of your business. And we don’t believe in unreasonable price jumps between packages either.

5. Security

Cybercrime is a massive problem around the globe. In South Africa it is estimated that we have the third-highest number of attacks globally, resulting in a R2.2-billion loss per year. As the foundation of your website, your hosting should help to protect your website and data from vulnerabilities.

Investigate:- What kind of security measures are in place?

At Domains.co.za, we ensure that your website’s data is encrypted, by providing a free SSL certificate. In addition, we run daily backups, malware scanning, and offer our customers with SPAM and virus protection.

6. Customer Service & Support

Website hosting isn’t a once-off purchase, it is a monthly subscription and therefore customer service and support is crucial when trying to find the best website hosting companies for your website.

Investigate:- What kind of support is provided?- What are other customers saying about the company online?

At Domains.co.za, our service and support go far beyond the initial sale. We have a dedicated team and make use of a ticketing system to ensure all queries are dealt with in a timely fashion.

Our entire web hosting environment is monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using sophisticated monitoring software which supervises all aspects of our hosting infrastructure.

7. User Interface

The User Interface used by the hosting company is incredibly important, especially if you want to add and make edits to your email accounts, hosting and website yourself.

Investigate:- What is the User Interface being used?- What are the benefits and limitations of the Interface?

Domains.co.za offers our shared web hosting customers a choice to using either DirectAdmin, or cPanel web control panels. Both of these control panels are industry-leading, easy to use and incredibly stable. They both provide customers with a series of advanced features including AI software installation, usage statistics, etc. 

Domains.co.za is one of South Africa’s leading, local, web hosting providers. As experts in hosting, we are able to offer our customers MORE: more options, more security, more features, more reliability and more speed.