12 Points to Check When Selecting a Web Host for Your Australian Business

Selecting the right web hosting for your business is vital to the success of your online business, but too many business owners make the wrong choice. So here are 12 tips to help you choose the right hosting company for your business, such as the top web hosting company in Australia – iiNet.

1. Customer support: Select a hosting company that offers 24/7 customer phone support, not just email support. When your website crashes or the server goes down, you want someone on the end of the phone fast.
2. Tech support: Unless you can afford your own in-house computer support, you want to make sure that their customer support includes technical help when you need it.
3. Are they a reseller? Resellers offer web hosting that they purchase from larger hosting companies. This usually means that they don’t have direct access to the servers if something goes wrong and you have to wait for the owners of the servers to resolve the problem.
4. Do they have redundancies in place? If the server goes down or it is hacked, any quality hosting provider will have sufficient redundancies in place to accommodate all of their clients and keep your site up and running.
5. Do they backup your website? Whilst you should always backup your own website, having another backup saved at the server level is always a good idea.
6. Do they offer dedicated servers? You may want to access your own dedicated resources, not have to share them with hundreds of other businesses on the same server (as the latter slows your loading times).
7. How fast do their websites load? You want your website to load quickly on your client’s browsers, so ask them for the URL of similar sized websites they host, so you can check their loading speeds.
8. Can you pay for your hosting in AUD? If your web host is located overseas, then you might have to pay them in their local currency. This is fine if the rate is one to one, but if the currency rates fluctuate too much, you could be paying a lot more for your hosting than you anticipated.
9. What are their uptimes? Any good hosting provider should be able to tell you the percent of time their servers are down and the percentage of time your website is live. You want a provider with a 99.99% uptime, which ensures that your customers always have access to your website.
10. Do they offer a choice of CMS’s? If you want WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, you want a host that makes it very easy for you to load your choice of CMS to your domain. On the other hand, you might be happy to fiddle with FTP uploads, but you need to decide what you want before you sign on the dotted line.
11. Software compatibility: If you want to use in-house software or other systems on your website, then you need to make sure that these are compatible your web host.
12. Where are you going to host your email: Do you want to host your email from a different system, such as Office 365 or are you going to rely on your web host for this service? An important point here is to consider the amount of storage space the web host offers, because this may impact on your decision.

With these 12 tips you will have no problem finding the right web hosting company in Australia for your business.