If most of your customers are in UK region (or even in Europe) then you may want to serve them with faster response time when they land on your website. This can be achieved by decreasing proximity of your website server and visitors.
If website’s content is hosted in US based servers then they can
achieve better response time in US and surrounded regions only but for UK users it may
take slightly higher response time.
You should choose UK Web
hosting server carefully. If most of your website’s visitors are from UK
or Europe then you shouldn’t ignore that fact that hosting your
website’s content in UK has many other benefits as well. Search engines
these days consider site’s hosting location as a signal to serve search
results. If your site is hosted in UK servers that you will have higher
chances of appearing on local search queries compared to global results.
These days, If you want to launch a website on UK based servers then you have multiple options to select from. There are many leading website hosting companies that focus their operations mainly in UK. They offer a wide range of plans with varying features and pricing.
It is important for you to know what exactly you need and then look out for a hosting website that offers those features at an affordable cost. There is no point paying for features you will not use. Besides if you require some additional features in the future, you can always upgrade your membership plan. Below are some prominent features that you should keep in mind while selecting a hosting website and its plan.
You should be clear with how many domains you need. There are various plans with one or more free domain names.
You should also look to get the option of unlimited addon domains and subdomain names. In addition to this be crystal clear if you want hosting for Linux or Windows. If you want to transfer a domain name from some other hosting website, you should check if this process can be carried out easily and if there would be any additional charges for the transfer.
A high bandwidth gives to better ROI if you have thousands of visitors while a big disc space gives you the freedom to add whatever you want to your website. You can easily get an affordable shared hosting plan which gives you infinite bandwidth and an infinite disk space as well. The problem with shared hosting however is that they may limit you from using more than certain RAM so they’re often not ideal for scaling when something goes viral on your website and you temporarily need to accommodate more server I/O. They are however great money savers and you must choose them if you’re just beginning with Internet business.
A user friendly Control Panel will make your job easy. Your Control Panel should be properly organized and all the options must be clearly embedded and easily accessible. Besides this it would be handy if the it comes with a description of all the options present. This way you will not need any instruction guide for most of the part. A responsive Control Panel is very important because no one wants to work with a dashboard that takes time to process your requests.
Most hosting companies these days offers cPanel as a standard hosting control panel and there is no doubt about simplicity and features it has to offer. If you’re at beginner or intermediate lever with web hosting stuff then you shouldn’t choose any other control panel but cPanel (or ISPConfig in case you want to save some money). However if you want more flexibilities and control over your hosting account then you may try control panels like Virtualmin, Plesk or DirectAdmin.
SEO tools are very important to increase your online visibility. You should look out for a hosting company that includes SEO tools as a part of their plan. The SEO tools will make recommendations for your content following which will optimize your website for the search results. The SEO tools also help you to find the target keywords and competition analysis.
A website analytics tools will help you understand the performance of your website. It will give you a detailed analysis of the incoming traffic. You will also be able to figure out from where your audience is coming to your website. Most website hosing companies offer row log analysis tools such as AWStats or Webalizer with shared hosting plans.
Apps make your life easier. Not only the apps make your website more interactive, but they also help you with your business. You should know what kind of apps you would require and look for them in the hosting plans. There are various categories of apps like blogging, e-commerce, content management, gallery, community management, forms and CMS management among many others. The apps should be easy to install and should not slow your website down.
Some web hosting companies offers one-click (or a few clicks) app installation meaning you can install leading open source scripts like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or Magento and many other scripts by just proving your admin panel username and password for installation. That can make life a lot easier with users who don’t want to deal with databases or configuration settings.
Cloud hosting is an advanced hosting and it is something that not all hosting companies offer. A cloud hosted website is a able to maintain a high uptime and better response time because the website is not dependent on a single server. In case you website is dependent on a single server, it will go offline if there is a problem with the server. But in case of cloud hosting if a server malfunctions, another suitable server is deployed immediately to keep your website up. However cloud hosting services are far costlier than regular shared hosting (upto 20x) or even VPS Hosting but ideal solution for serious businesses whom little downtime can cost more!
Even if you are familiar with website hosting you might face some problems. In this case you will need some assistance. Make sure that the website offers telephonic support 24X7. You should also ensure that the queue is not too large otherwise you will end up waiting for a lot of time. The option of live chat can also be very handy.
Your hosting website should offer you an advanced mailbox with key tools like webmail access, auto responders, email forwarding, mailing lists, email aliases etc. Backup can be a very important feature too. It will provide you protection against losing some or all of your data. FTP, SFTP or SSH login feature will enable you to give server and files access to users. A money back guarantee will make sure that you get your money back in case the hosting website doesn't deliver as promised.