6 Features that Make Premium Web Hosting Worth the Money

No words can accurately describe the risk a company undertakes when they choose any cheap, random monthly hosting plan. Should some unforeseen event happen, such as the resignation of the IT personnel who set it up, the company can lose its website, and as a result, part of, or all their business. You really cannot overemphasize the importance of having a good hosting plan, especially if your website is your business, or the means through which you get leads. Here are six compelling reasons that will have you sold on premium hosting.

Monitoring and Security

It was previously averaged that over 30,000 websites are hacked every day, which is quite the grim statistic indeed. Hackers might not necessarily single out your website, but they will explore any vulnerability they can find.

A good hosting service forestalls such incidents by having impenetrable firewalls and server side security that is built-in. The security protocols are usually layered, and there is consistent monitoring of the site to deter any attacks. Ideally, there should only be a few plugins allowed as these are often a point of vulnerability.

Performance

Premium hosting services invest in proprietary technology for caching to enable faster load times. They also offer CDN, or content delivery networks, which makes it easier for your users to access content quickly and seamlessly. This enables you to attract visitors and keep them. It also improves SEO performance as load times are among the many factors Google uses in page ranking.

Internet users are an impatient lot and anything as little as two second page load time delays might make them leave. In fact, every second delay affects conversion and customer satisfaction by 7 and 11 percent respectively. A CDN is therefore a must-have and by reducing loading times by as much as 50%, the hosting service will give a good ROI.

Easy Backup and Restore

Your site has to be backed up daily. Restoring it should be easy. A good hosting service automates this backup feature and keeps the backups for at least a month. Others allow you to back up with a click, which is convenient when you want to update your site, and a click to restore if you wish to undo your changes.

A cheap service might have a backup and restore options, but they are often ineffective and time consuming, and have the potential to bring down your site.

Staging servers for website testing and updating

A staging server enables you to move your site to a different server where you can test it out with new changes, themes and plugins. If they are all good, then you can make them live with a simple click.

Automatic Plugin, CMS and Theme Updates

If these updates are not made, a website can go down. A good service will not only alert you of new updates, but automatically implement them. The updates can be tested on a staging server and deployed when they are deemed effective.

Customer Service

Nothing is as reassuring as knowing you have someone to help you out when you encounter a problem. A case in point is with an open source CMS, where without some help you would struggle looking through user forums.

If you want to enjoy these features and more, you can scale up your hosting package with your current provider if they have premium offerings, or simply move to a new hosting platform.

Premium hosting services do have one disadvantage. Moving from them is typically a very involved process. However, this is trivial compared to all of the advantages you are getting to begin with.