A website can’t function without a server to host it, and yet many agencies often see web hosting as an afterthought. However, choosing the right hosting company is essential to providing customers with superior service. Your clients pay you to design, architect and launch their sites. Therefore, if anything goes wrong with your client’s website, you will be their first call. Clients won’t distinguish between a problem within your control and one that’s the web host’s fault. To keep clients happy, you need to choose a dependable hosting provider that provides excellent customer service and can offer the features your clients’ websites will require.
There are several factors to should consider when choosing a hosting solution for web agencies. Let’s examine a few of the questions you should ask when looking for a hosting company for your agency.
1. Hosting Provider or Reseller?
As an agency, you have a choice between a provider who offers their own hosting and a reseller who is selling space on a hosting company’s server. Many resellers are local, and choosing a friendly reseller in your town means supporting a local business and having easy access to someone if something’s not right. However, many reseller hosting options aren’t ideal for your business clients, especially those with high demand sites. This is because the reseller is likely renting a VPS or a dedicated server from their hosting provider and then crowding as many customers on it as possible, including yours. It’s also possible that they may be taking a basic hosting plan from the provider and then marking them up to sell to you. Furthermore, just because your reseller is local doesn’t mean their servers are. Visiting them to solve your problems may result in you sitting with them while speaking to support from the actual provider.
Therefore, if you want to offer your clients a web hosting solution that will allow them to grow and expand, you need to go with an actual hosting company and not a reseller.
2. Where is the Data Center Located?
The choice to go with a hosting company instead of a reseller may seem simple, but no two providers are the same. When comparing providers, you will need to consider where their data centers are located and whether the host lets you choose which data center your client’s site will use. A data center’s location is crucial because it can affect your client’s web site’s speed and latency. When a server is far away from its users, data and information will need to travel farther distances. As a result, pages may be slow to load, and you may encounter latency issues. This will no doubt frustrate your clients and frustrate their customers which could affect your business. For this reason, when researching hosting providers, look into where their data centers are located and whether you can choose which data center to use.
3. What Hosting Packages and Options are Offered?
Besides choosing a hosting provider with the right data center locations, you also need to find a host that offers you the packages and options that will meet your customer’s needs and budgets. The size of your clients’ businesses will determine whether they need a shared hosting plan, a VPS plan, or a dedicated server. It’s therefore important that you choose a hosting company that offers the appropriate package for your clients. Additionally, you will want to consider the dependability of your provider. Ideally, you want an uptime of 99.59% or more and a load speed of between 400 and 700 ms.
4. What kind of Support Do they Offer?
As the point person for any issues that may arise with your customer’s website, you need to rely on your hosting company to support you. For this reason, you should choose a website hosting company that has flexible support methods and multiple methods of communication. Ideally, they should also be available 24/7 and offer a knowledge library.
Conclusion
Choosing the right hosting company for your agency is crucial because it will ultimately affect how your client’s websites perform. You want to ensure that issues with the web host are kept to a minimum to keep your clients happy. For these reasons, you should choose to go with a hosting provider rather than a reseller and choose a provider with data locations near your clients, packages that meet their needs, and 24/7 support.
