When it comes to choosing a hosting provider, there are a number of things that you need to take into consideration prior to making the final choice. On the one hand, inexperienced users might be looking entirely at the price of the service, rather than at the big picture and the quality and additional features that the provider might be offering. While this can work if your website is not that substantial in received traffic, it can be quite detrimental for large companies and online businesses that expect to have their business taking place wholly online.
In this article we are going to focus on and discuss the additional features that hosting providers can offer you rather than just having a glance at the price of their servers as such features can more often than not add an extra layer of goodness to the service.
DDoS Protection can save you downtime
The first feature that we want to touch upon is DDoS protection. Hackers and other cyberattack individuals commonly tend to send fake traffic to many websites across the Web. This artificial traffic is known as a DDoS attack and it involves your server not being able to cope and process all of the requests that are coming towards its way. This ultimately results in the server shutting down and your website going offline along with it. This downtime is something that you do not want to experience as it can mean lost clients and potential sales. Additionally, this can also negatively reflect on your search engine performance.
Such issues can be easily avoided if your hosting provider offers extra secure DDoS protection by either including it in your plan or having it be purchasable as an add-on feature. Regardless, having sufficient protection will save you a lot of headaches in the future.
Alternative payment methods
Another important feature for hosting providers to have is whether they allow customers to pay for their servers using alternative payment methods. Examples of such alternatives are cryptocurrencies. Paying with crypto is not only cheaper, especially when making international payments, but is also substantially more secure as it protects the identity and privacy of the individual, enabling them to pay anonymously and not have to disclose any additional information.
Hosting providers usually label such services Bitcoin VPS or crypto VPS, depending on the type of currencies that they accept. This is a feature that has been neglected in the past, but with the upsurge of crypto over the last few years in particular, it is slowly becoming a very sought after feature.
Backups, snapshots and other saved data
When it comes to protecting your website’s content, it is absolutely vital for your hosting provider to offer backups, snapshots or any other type of data-saving and protection. Such a feature will ensure that your website can be safely restored in the case of a system failure, server meltdown or hacker attacks.
In terms of which is better, snapshots are usually utilized for small scale changes and for testing, copying data and quick system rollbacks. Backups, on the other hand, are preserved for much longer and they contain a full copy of the website including the database, which snapshots most commonly do not.
Overall, there are a number of other features that you should be looking out for in a hosting provider such as floating IPs, flexible and scalable plans and unlimited bandwidth, which can also prove to be quite beneficial. Above all, you should remember to choose a provider that has a quick-responding, reliable and helpful support team, as they will most commonly be your point of contact for any issues that you encounter with your services. Because of this, it is important to have someone who will be willing to help you resolve any problem or conflicts as soon as possible.
