What are some key features of hosting?
We recently conducted a survey of over 100 agencies and businesses that highlighted the key features that they wanted from a hosting provider. And while each hosting provider offers a different service level there are some core features that were highlighted:
- Back-ups. Pretty self-explanatory but this is where a hosting provider retains a backup of your host environment. Questions to ask are how often are back-ups taken and what is the data recovery process?
- 24/7 support. Again, another self-explanatory feature but not all support is created equal. What support can you receive at 11pm compared to 11am? Do the answers match or is one a holding statement?
- Monitoring. What is your hosting provider doing to ensure the worst doesn’t occur? And is that dual monitoring between people and systems? Or systems alone?
- Migration from existing service. If you need to move a new client to your hosting, will your hosting provider help? Or will it be left to your team?
- Uptime. Another feature that speaks for itself but how does this compare to other providers?
- Full management. Do you need to configure your own servers or can your hosting provider help? Understanding the time and cost implications is important.
- Response time. How quickly will your hosting provider respond? And with a useful answer?
- Environmental focus. While not a top feature highlighted by all our survey respondents this is likely to increase as we all strive towards net zero and reducing our carbon emissions.
And why do these features matter to developers and agencies?
We’ve highlighted some of the key features of hosting above but why should they matter to developers and agencies? Here are a few of the reasons why:
- Uptime – A high level of uptime gives your team, your clients and their customers one less thing to worry about. A website that experiences a higher-than-average level of downtime is not good for anyone’s business. Finding a reliable hosting provider is important to mitigate risks and let your developers focus on what they do best: developing a website fit for users.
- Security Measures – We’d include back-ups and monitoring here as well as SSL certificates and security audits. These are crucial to keeping your client’s data safe plus their customers’ data safe. Finding a host that can provide these leaves your development team to focus on coding over cyber threats.
- Scalability – You want your hosting provider to seamlessly be able to handle traffic spikes while your development team focus on the user experience over server optimisation.
- Performance and Loading Speed – Users expect a fast-loading website, slow loading will result in a poor user experience. Your development team need a host that can advise on content delivery networks, solid-state drives and server-level caching while they focus on optimising images and on-page loading.
- Technical Support – A hosting provider that can do some of the legwork for you such as migrations while also responding quickly is invaluable. If you choose a hosting provider that can help you move your client’s websites if needed or work with you on troubleshooting then you can solve the problems for your clients more quickly. Enabling their customers to have as seamless a service as possible.
- Control and Customisation – A hosting provider that provides a fully managed service enables your development team to provide a brief or spec to the host and let them configure the servers. Features like root access, choice of operating system, and server configurations can be vital for optimising your website’s performance. Such flexibility empowers your development team to fine-tune the environment to suit the project’s needs, leading to efficient development and better results.
What are the next steps?
If any of what we’ve said is ringing alarm bells for you then it might be time to review your current hosting providers. Sit down and talk with your development team to see how much time they are spending on hosting configuration over coding. If it feels too much and you aren’t able to recoup that cost then start looking for a fully managed hosting provider who can:
- Respond quickly
- Give technical responses
- Monitor your sites
- Provide applicable experience
To name but a few things. We’re always happy to talk to any agency or business that requires hosting, simply access our live chat or raise a support ticket.