Things to Know about finding Reliable Web Designing and Hosting Services
To find the most reliable web designing and hosting services, you should first understand the actual objective of your website, your future expansion plans, and the growth rates of these services over time. In this article, we will discuss a few practical tips to choose the best web design and hosting services.
Understand what you have to expect
While you buy third-party designing and hosting services, you may not get exactly what you paid for on not being diligent about it. Web design is an unknown cranny to novice businesspeople and hosting is another such gray area with a lot of twists and turns to mislead you. One thing you should remember while availing such services is that high price is not a guarantee to excellent service.
Whatever the pricing be, it is also not assured that the services you avail are always turned to your needs and objectives. There are many cases where the website owners are ultimately suffering from the services they availed with not only loss of time and money in developing and hosting, but there will also be recurring costs in website management over time. One such case study is as below.
Sample case#: Overburdening design & hosting
An organization spent thousands of dollars to build their website and host it for a year’s time. It was a basic website, which consists of a few pages of plain text and a few images. The site even doesn’t have any database, input forms, or heavy content. The only form it had was ‘contact us’ entry which initiates an e-mail to the site administrator.
The entire design work wouldn’t have taken a couple of days to complete. As a small business, it was such a massive amount for the business owner to bear, but this is how the consulting firm charged for design, domain registration, and hosting. Moreover, the site development also lacks in its search engine compatibility and got rated very low on leading search engines.
Considering these facts, it is essential for the website owners to have a baseline understanding of web design and hosting, cost involved in it, and the do’s and don’ts of choosing a provider.
Don’t fall in for ‘too good to believe’ offers on ads
Low price design and hosting services are always there on advertisements. All of these may not be reliable. If cost is the only consideration you make, many times you may be ending up with an inexperienced designer may take a lot of time to complete site development/updates, or a substandard shared hosting service with no uptime guarantee.
Some of the inexperienced low-cost design and hosting services may also cause your web pages to load very slow, which ultimately affects the SEO and user acceptance of your site. To avoid such problems clients used to face with web designing services, here are some basic things which you need to know as suggested by Big Drop Inc.com experts.
- Domain name registration. You need a unique and relevant address in the .com or .org domain to represent your establishment online rightly. It is better than you make this selection than allowing the developer to do it on your behalf.
- Setting up your site on an appropriate hosting service. Once the domain is registered, you can assess your space requirement and avail a hosting service.
- Design the web pages by custom coding or by choosing readymade templates of a proper CMS application.
- Developing relevant and informative content for your website.
Considering the nature of your website and what all things you want to include on it, some other add-on services to be considered include, but not limited to:
- Setting up a custom website on any good CMS (content management system) like WordPress.
- Designing graphics or original artwork, photos, or videos.
- Ding custom photography for the website images.
- Ensuring SEO features of the website to be easily found online.
- Setting up an e-cart for e-commerce sites for the visitors to make online purchases.
- Integrating third party application for online money transactions, payment gateways, etc.
- Maintaining supplementary blogs, link building, pay per click, or social media marketing, etc. to enhance site traffic.
- Updating and maintaining the webs pages on a regular basis.
All-in-one packages
It is very common that many companies offer the full package including domain registration, design, and hosting with SEO and social media management, etc. Even though it seems to be more convenient to get all these under one umbrella, it is not a good idea. Some of these may offer excellent design services, but compromised hosting or SEO whereas some other primarily hosting service providers offering the rest as add-on services may not give you the best in those.
It is also the fact that the companies charge a flat, all-inclusive fee, so you may be ending up paying more for even the services which you need not avail. Thus, the ideal approach is to identify the best providers in their field of expertise and combine all these to offer your website a unique edge. Even on approaching such a multi-talented service provider, ensure that you get an itemized quote bus specifying the fee for individual services they offer.
Knowing security
Security is a key aspect if you own a business website, which many of them tend to downplay by taking what the provider offers for granted. Handling all your critical business data, make sure that best security mechanisms are adopted by development and hosting services to protect your business transaction and customer information. Some important things to consider are:
- Data backup: Best web hosting services will offer backup services with which you can easily restore all your web page information and data even in case of a crisis.
- SSL security: If you run an e-com site, then you need more security to safeguard the resources and protect the online transactions. So, it is ideal to make sure that your hosting service offers Secure Socket Layer features for security.
To conclude, there are plenty of web designing and hosting services available out there with which you can surely find the solutions for your website needs. However, to do it at best, you should first have in-depth knowledge and understanding of the actual needs and who is out there to handle your requirements at the best and offer optimum return on investment.
