Our small business website needs to be hosted on a web server or simply a server that is connected to the World Wide Web so that anyone can access our website.But how can we choose this?

Choosing a web hosting company for our small business website is easy if we follow the guide we have layout for this. Depending on the scale of our business, the type of business we run and our level of technical competency, there will always be a right hosting provider just for our business.

The general rule of choosing a web hosting provider is down to:

Excellent Customer Support

Company Stability

Robust Datacenter

Affordability

Excellent Customer Support If all things being equal, we can rate customer support as by number 1 determining factor in choosing a web hosting provider. Relying on testimonials found on the provider’s site is a common approach to assess a company’s level of customer excellence but it is also quite an old one.

The level of customer support is sometimes as easy as finding out whether they have enough employees to support their level of business growth. We should look at the Customer to Employee ratio, CE ratio, as a benchmark.

Getting As Close As we Can The other accurate way to assess the real status of its customer service is to get as close as we can to the company whenever possible via some means.

Live chat helps to know that we can have our questions answered almost immediately with a live chat function. Test it out by answering some basic questions to see its response time and also test its level of technical competency. Not critical but it’s good to have.

Number of Telephone Lines to see if there are separate telephone lines for sales, customer service and technical support. We should avoid companies who use only 1 line to serve everyone. A professional small business hosting provider should have this in place.

The real condition of any web hosting company’s customer support is really found in its members forum if any. We will get a good part of complains and praises but if the complains outnumber the compliments, it’s time to stop it.

A company’s stability can be measured by the length of time they have been in business, the number of customers company have served and are serving and lastly their financial standing.

As a business owner a web hosting company that has been around for at least 5 years would have weathered all sorts of ups and downs in the online world, and their chance of being around is much higher than a company that has been around for less than a year.

Though public listed web hosting providers have better financial transparency than the privately owned ones, they are not necessary always in a better financial shape than them. Bottom line, we would host our small business with a company that we know is growing in their customer base.

Robust Datacenter Datacenters are where the web servers are resided on, and ultimately where our webpages will be accessed from. A strong and credible small business web hosting company would have the ability to own and managed their data centers or through colocation.