When it comes to hiring your website hosting company and your business internet service provider, you cannot afford to make sloppy or badly informed choices. Web hosting and Internet connection to your home or commercial office are the two most vital parts of your entire digital business presence and they have to both be run with the highest possible consideration for security, speed and reliability.
Here are some tips and things to consider for when you’re choosing both of these vital services.
1. Insecure Hosting, Insecure Clients
The strength of what your hosting provider offers is the lynchpin of your site’s digital reliability. This is because your servers, the storage points of all your site information and client information are protected principally by the security measures that your webhost has put in place.
Thus, if these security measures are lacking or even nonexistent, then you too are in danger, and your clients by extension. Your clients have no way of knowing this, but they will quickly find out if you suffer a serious data breach to your online storage.
In order to avoid this problem, make sure that you don’t play around with the quality of hosting service you buy for your website. Go for well known providers that offer a wide menu of business hosting options and take their clients server security seriously.
At a minimum, they should offer secure FTP, anti intrusion measures, dedicated servers and strong internal encryption options. If possible, also go for a webhost that offers two factor authentication as a server or channel protection option.
2. Low Bandwidth and Delayed Business Affairs
Your business office absolutely needs the most reliable, robust possible internet connection you can reasonably afford, and this type of internet is rarely going to be residential grade. Instead, you should be contracting a business internet service that will guarantee strong download/upload speeds that offer a minimum of 25 Mbps, 24 hour dedicated IT support and decent wireless options.
Hiring this kind of service will almost certainly cost more than paying for residential internet connectivity, but the investment is worthwhile, especially if you plan on holding video conferences, frequently updating your websites with lots of heavy new information or doing a lot of cloud based work projects that require a strong web connection.
3. Scalability of Services
The internet service and hosting service that you hire should also offer a wide enough menu of options or at least a large enough capacity so that scalability won’t be a problem for when your business really starts to grow.
You don’t want to wind up in a situation in which you’re number of site visitors is causing your server to crash or your daily bandwidth use in your business office is being maxed out and causing delays in transmission at crucial moments. Instead, plan for at least near term potential future growth and choose your services accordingly.
4. Number of Connected Devices
This related to the speed of your business internet connection and is something that you need to include in your service plans: the number of devices, including PCs, mobile devices and other machines, that you plan on having connected to your office internet connection is important.
Also important is the question of what all of these devices will be doing while they’re connected to your office wireless network. For example, if you plan on running several computers with several programmers working at each one and doing data intensive collaboration work over cloud services with others across the globe, you’ll definitely need a more robust business internet connection and local wireless network system than you would if you were a single CPA running their own accounting business with the help of a secretary.
Also, if your business uses video calling services like those from InterCall, Skype, or GoToMeeting you’ll need a certain amount of bandwidth to account for these technologies.
Take these sorts of factors into consideration.
5. Review your Options
When you’re looking for an internet service provider that can give you access to a high quality business internet connection and a webhost who can guarantee business class hosting and security, make sure that you really do your research. Look at online reviews, listen to testimonials from other companies who’ve used the services of both companies and also maybe consider talking to your own friends and business partners, who might already have their own decent providers and can tell you who they like working with or what company to avoid.
Getting this research out of the way right off the bat will save you a lot of trouble down the road.
About the author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, marketing, marketing tech and brand promotion. He also loves to read and write about subjects as varied as the idea of a location-free business, portable business management, and strategic marketing and advertising tactics. When he’s not busy writing or consulting, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.
