Launching a website is one thing. Ensuring it stays up, secure, and fully functional from start to finish is another. Whether you go with Uplancer or another website hosting provider, the selection process is the same; it has to meet your business needs, which we know can change at any point.
When choosing a business-friendly hosting provider, check out our hosting provider checklist below.
Your Checklist for Selecting a Reliable Hosting Provider
If your website hosting provider does not provide the following capabilities, it’s time for a new one:
1. Automated Backups for Peace of Mind
Mistakes happen. Cyberattacks, server crashes, or plugin updates can break your site. Without periodic automatic backups, you risk permanent data loss and expensive recovery efforts. With the right hosting provider, you can restore your website instantly, preventing downtime and lost revenue. Don’t learn the hard way and start with daily backups for peace of mind when the shit hits the fan!
2. Staging Environment for Testing Updates Safely
A staging environment replicates your live site and tests updates before they go public. It ensures three things:
- Your customers never see unfinished website designs or glitches, keeping your brand image intact.
- If your website crashes from the updates, you can fix it or roll your server back to the most recent backup.
- With some care planning, you can easily move those changes to production (live site) without customers ever knowing.
3. Scalable Website Hosting to Scale with Your Traffic
Your hosting must scale as your business grows. Whether you’re running ads or experiencing a seasonal traffic surge, your hosting should adapt in real-time to prevent slow load times or crashes. A good digital marketing team would coordinate with your website hosting provider to handle traffic efficiently, which may throttle or boost your server accordingly.
4. Load Balancer for Maximum Uptime
For businesses running paid campaigns, every second counts. A load balancer splits traffic across different servers and ensures your website remains accessible even when one server fails. We recommend AWS for its built-in redundancy and ability to pay as you go.
5. DNS Management for a Seamless Integration Experience
Your website hosting must allow custom DNS configurations to support email setup, domain management, CDN integration, and certain analytics tracking. This is a no-brainer and is standard for all businesses. Otherwise, DNS limitations on your hosting provider will force you to look elsewhere to do anything beyond a basic website.
6. Easy CDN Setup for Faster Load Times
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) dramatically improves website speed by caching content closer to your customers’ locations. Without an easy CDN setup, you risk slower page speeds, leading to higher bounce rates and lower search rankings. CDNs are the standard for modern website hosting and a must-have for any business website.
Need a Better Website Hosting Provider?
We work with top hosting providers, including Flywheel, Bluehost, WP Engine, GoDaddy, and AWS. While all have their strengths, AWS offers the most flexibility and scalability for businesses looking beyond a basic website. For example, Flywheel limits developer access, which can delay web development progress. GoDaddy and UenI have limitations that may hinder advanced functionalities like AI and ML integrations. AWS has it all and provides full customization, security, and future-proof scalability.
In fact, we love AWS so much that we’ve even white labeled their hosting and simplified it by configuring it accordingly. Learn more about our website hosting solution here.
What’s Included with Uplancer’s Website Hosting Services?
We are Columbus, Ohio’s top web design and development agency, and with our hosting service, your website remains up, secure, and optimized, no matter what. We’ve designed our hosting service to prevent problems proactively through automation and alarms, so you never have to worry about website downtime.
Additionally, our website hosting covers the following:
- Ongoing security maintenance
- Cloud server updates
- Cloud and local backups
- CMS instance updates
- Plugin updates
- SSL certificates management
- Integrations with CMS
- Web traffic scalability
- Website domain management
- Website performance
- Dedicated staging instance
- Email server management
How We’re Different:
- Customizable to fit your business needs.
- Real-time monitoring with automated issue resolution (e.g., auto-restart if a failure is detected).
- Tech-driven hosting solutions inspired by our experience in app development and digital marketing.
- AWS-powered infrastructure for unmatched scalability and security.
Website Hosting: Make It Your Competitive Advantage
Too many businesses take website hosting for granted until it’s too late. A slow or broken website sends potential customers straight to your competitors. Worse, search engines and social media platforms penalize poor website performance, affecting your overall SEO rankings and ad performance: a double whammy for website traffic. Ultimately, a bad hosting provider doesn’t just impact uptime; it affects your entire digital strategy. Make sure your website hosting supports your business growth, not hinders it.
The Bottom Line
Selecting the right website hosting provider matters. Keep the following in mind when doing so:
- A reliable and scalable website hosting is crucial for long-term business success.
- Poor hosting = lost sales, wasted ads, and a damaged brand reputation.
- Uplancer’s managed hosting solutions keep your site up, fast, and secure, always.
Ready to future-proof your website hosting? Contact Uplancer for more details about our expert website hosting and web design services.
