Importance
People who are new to website ownership or maintenance tend to spend a lot of time worrying about their design, or pushing their social feeds. These are all great, but without a great web-hosting package, they are worthless.
On the other side of that, a website that doesn’t have the best design can often benefit from quality hosting.
Ideally, you want a balance of great hosting and top design. It is possible to get the best of both worlds, and you should not let anyone tell you otherwise.
Now, onto choosing a great host.
Which Server?
A shared server is going to be a no-no if you are trying to drive traffic to your site. You are left with the choice between a VPS server and a dedicated one.
If you are looking at relatively low traffic to start with, then VPS could be a good solution, and save money against buying a dedicated server unnecessarily at this stage. Just make sure you are able to upgrade as and when you need to, and are not expected to see out a full year, for example, before making the move.
Uptime
Remember the scenario of e-mailing the disgruntled customer? If your host provider is unable to keep your website online 99.9% of the time, you run the risk of finding yourself without customers to get disgruntled in the first place.
If even one person cannot get to your site, that person might have been about to spend a lot of money with you, and represents a missed opportunity. Ensure that you are protected against downtime with a money back guarantee, or something similar.
Site Speed
Most reports quote five seconds as the time the average Internet user will wait for a page to load. Any longer, and you are going to lose business. Make sure your site loads quickly and has the capability to do so even when traffic increases significantly.
The performance of your web-hosting package affects your business and your reputation. Take the time to choose the best possible hosting service, and position your business to move forward without stress.