Regardless of its type and functionality, a website has a significant role in your branding effort. To obtain optimum results, it’s vital that your site not only looks appealing but also functions properly. A website’s performance highly depends on the hosting it uses. Besides ensuring your website’s availability on the web, web hosting provides all the necessary resources and hardware needed to deliver a flawless browsing experience. In this article, we’ll share the most common mistakes you must avoid while choosing your WordPress first web hosting.
For this reason, you must choose the right web hosting from the beginning — like Hostinger’s high-quality web hosting plans. Otherwise, your site won’t produce the desired results.
As various web hosting providers are available on the market today, picking the best one for your site might seem daunting. If you’re about to purchase your first web hosting service, this article is for you. The following are some of the most common mistakes WordPress users make when choosing a hosting service for their site.
1. Opting for Free Web Hosting Mistake
Referring to the apartment analogy, can you acquire an apartment free of charge? The answer is no because it doesn’t work that way. Similarly, it’s improbable that a web hosting provider can offer you top-tier services and abundant resources without charging a single penny.
Individuals who run a small blog as a hobby may find free hosting services more than enough to publish their site. However, business sites with a bigger purpose and higher stakes will find their functionality and resources limiting.
Free hosting providers, for one, tend to provide slow and unreliable services. They can also force your site to host third-party ads to compensate for the free resources, negatively affecting user experience and SEO. Also, the sub-part features and limited resources make it challenging to scale your site.
For these reasons, it’s best to avoid free web hosting providers at all costs. Instead, consider investing in reputable paid hosting providers and reap the benefits later.
2. Mistakes to Avoid Choosing Web Hosting: Wrong Plan
Selecting an excellent hosting is only half the battle. Newbies tend to fall into the price trap, opting for a cheap hosting plan without weighing your site’s needs. Consequently, they lack the resources and hardware needed or overpay for a hosting plan that is too big for their website.
When determining your hosting type, you must consider several factors — traffic volume, data storage, price, security, and technical knowledge.
If you expect low-volume traffic, you can go with shared hosting. Since the server resources are shared between multiple sites, this hosting type charges the lowest costs compared with other hosting types. Consequently, it has higher security risks and low scalability.
For more resources and better security, consider opting for VPS hosting. It provides dedicated resources and better security features to anticipate higher traffic volume and scale the site. Accordingly, VPS hosting tends to be more pricey than shared hosting for these reasons. Therefore, identify your site’s needs before choosing a long-term web hosting plan so as not to make mistakes.
3. Not Taking Customer Support Into Consideration
While we all want a smooth and flawless hosting experience, there’s bound to be a moment when your site encounters an issue. When that happens, you’d want to get a solution from your web host’s support team as soon as possible. So, you need to consider the effectiveness of your hosting provider’s customer service.
The best way to do it is by testing it out. You can contact your web host’s support team and ask them questions that haven’t been answered on their site. Don’t forget to verify their availability as well. Most of today’s hosting providers promise 24/7 support, but some fail to deliver.
Make sure the support team’s choices of communication channels are accessible to you while choosing your web hosting so as not to make mistakes. If your chosen web host operates in another country, contacting them by phone won’t be a practical or affordable solution for you.
Additionally, you can browse through blog reviews and forums to gain information about their response time and product knowledge.
4. Foregoing Money-Back Guarantee
Even with all the research you do, there’s still a chance you end up with the wrong hosting provider. You should opt for a hosting provider with a money-back guarantee to avoid wasting money. It allows you to test the hosting plan and see if it suits your needs, ensuring you only pay for what you want.
Check the refund policy, as it usually comes with limitations. There are cases where this service only offers pro-rated refunds or is non-applicable to add-on products like domains and security features.
Extra Points
- Not Reading User Reviews: User reviews are a goldmine of information. They provide insights into the host’s performance, reliability, and customer service. Avoid hosts with consistently negative reviews, as this is a red flag for potential issues.
- Overlooking Backup and Restore Options: Regular backups are a safety net for your website. Ensure your host offers automatic backups and easy restore options. This feature is invaluable in case of data loss or hacking incidents.
- Forgetting About Uptime Guarantees: Uptime is a measure of reliability. A host with high uptime percentages ensures that your site is almost always accessible to users. Avoid hosts with low uptime guarantees, as frequent downtimes can harm your site’s reputation and SEO ranking.
- Neglecting Security Features: Security is paramount in the digital world. An ideal WordPress hosting provider should offer robust security features like regular backups, malware scanning, and SSL certificates. Underestimating the importance of security can leave your site vulnerable to attacks, resulting in data loss and reputational damage.
Mistakes to Avoid Choosing Web Hosting: The Bottom Line
Understanding how significant a web hosting service is to your WordPress site, you should make your choice count. By knowing how to avoid making rookie hosting mistakes, it’s easier to make a better decision that benefits the site and your brand.
Author
“Mary is a passionate blogger and the chief editor at her own content marketing company PRable.com. Since college, she’s been interested in break-through technology and technical writing about innovative products and services that change our everyday lives for the better. She’s also interested in web design and photography.”
