Your web hosting provider is an important choice to make, given how much the quality of a web host provider can affect how your website runs and operates. Whether you run a website for personal, professional, or business reasons, you should always ensure that you have a good web hosting provider.
Whenever you are looking for a good hosting provider, you can go to hostadvice.com for help.
With that said, here are eight definite signs that you have a poor-quality web hosting provider and that it’s time to change.
Frequent downtime
Your website is going to experience unexpected downtime every once in a while. Understandably, it would happen sometimes. However, it becomes a cause for concern if you are experiencing a lot of downtimes.
Frequent downtime costs you money, especially if you’re running an online business. Therefore, you want to reduce the likelihood of downtime with your website. Having a good quality web hosting provider is one of the best ways to reduce the possibility of you experiencing downtime.
Slow page load time
Web page loading time is another factor that you should look at when it comes to the quality of your web hosting provider. Again, many Internet users are used to fast loading speeds. Plus, Google and many search engines also consider the page loading time when considering how high a website or webpage should rank in search results.
The best or ideal page loading speed for your website should be around one or two seconds. Anything more and your webpage is taking too long, and people might be too impatient to stay. If you’ve considered any other factors outside of your web hosting provider’s quality of service to account for the slow page load time, then you should consider a change.
Slow server response time
Your server response time or SRT is an essential factor that lets you know that it might be time to get better quality web hosting. Server response time dictates how fast a web browser responds to your server for fulfilling different requests. Since many people want to get what they need as quickly as possible, server response time should also be fast.
Aside from that, if you want to rank higher on search engine results, it’s best to have a fast server response time. The ideal server response time shouldn’t be any higher than 200 milliseconds.
There are many ways you can make sure that you have a faster server response time. For example, if you’re choosing a provider for web hosting in NZ, it’s best to look for ones with New Zealand-based servers. That way, the server response time will be faster for your website visitors.
When you have a faster SRT, more website visitors will stay longer on your website, benefiting your search engine rankings.
Insufficient bandwidth allocation
Most web hosting companies and providers should offer unlimited bandwidth allocation for websites that they’re hosting. In a web hosting context, bandwidth refers to the capacity to transfer data between your website, the servers, and the users visiting the website.
If you have a shared hosting plan, the bandwidth allocation would be split between the people on the server. However, if you don’t have a shared server, you should have a sufficient allocated bandwidth since the server’s your own. Thus, if it’s not enough, there are apparent issues with your plan or the web hosting provider.
Unresponsive customer support
Customer support responsiveness is another critical factor that should tell you whether a web hosting provider is great. Look at previous customers’ comments and other reviews of the web host provider that you can find online. These should help you figure out how responsive their customer support truly is and how helpful they were.
Many hosting companies offer 24/7 customer support and a better quality of support depending on the provider’s plan you are subscribed to. Thus, before you purchase a plan, look at how well the customer support service of the web host first is.
Limited storage space
There is a specific amount of hard disk space on the web host’s server that each customer has, and it depends on the website and your plan. If your website has grown to the extent where there’s not enough hard disk space anymore, then it’s time to make a change.
You want to make sure that your web host can fulfill all of your storage needs so that the contents of your website don’t suffer.
Lack of security features
If your web host provider doesn’t have all the essential security features that every good quality web host should have, that’s a huge red flag. However, if your website will process many transactions, you might also want to look for web hosts that go above and beyond the minimum to ensure that your website is as secure as possible.
After all, a lack of security in your website won’t only harm you but also the people who may interact with your site in a specific way.
Absence of backup features
In case your website ever crashes, gets hacked, or anything else that causes your website any issues, your backups will be critical in ensuring that your website can get back up again. Your web hosting provider should be providing regular site backups as much as possible, usually on a daily or weekly basis.
If your web host provider doesn’t provide backup features, it’s time to switch web hosting providers.
Over to You
Once you see a few of these issues popping up often for your website, then you should start thinking about replacing your web hosting provider. Before you do that, though, you should also check whether your web hosting plan is the issue as well.
Either way, you shouldn’t be experiencing these issues at all if you want a smooth-running website, so if you see these signs, then they’re telling you that something needs to change for your website.
