Features to Consider in Commercial Web Hosting

When you’re looking for a web host that you can use for your own personal website, you’ll need to make sure that any host you use has the appropriate amount of bandwidth and storage space that you need. But when you’re trying to find a web host for your commercial site, there are a few other things that you’ll need to take into consideration. Here are some of the features you should look for, and why they’re important.

The first feature you might find with commercial web hosting is they might offer to provide or create email addresses for you. It’s unlikely, but if you’re managing your business’ website yourself and you don’t have a lot of knowledge about coding and web development, you might want to take the web host up on this offer. If however, you have a team of web developers that are highly skilled and can set up emails for you, you probably won’t need this service – and you really shouldn’t pay for it.

One feature that you will need to make sure your commercial web host has is data backup. Data backup will automatically make backup copies of your data, in case anything ever happens to your website. This can save you an immense amount of time and energy and if you don’t have it, you’re going to need to spend the time rebuilding and re-creating your website. That’s something you definitely don’t have time for, even if you’re working with a full team of web designers and developers!

Another absolute necessity you must have when looking at commercial web hosts is that they provide WHOIS. This service prevents anyone from stealing your personal information. While anyone can see your WHOIS information, only data mining programs are equipped to steal that information, allowing the person who released the program to steal your website, and some of your most precious information. If you’re a business and you’re running any kind of website (which just about all do these days,) the importance of making sure it’s equipped with WHOIS cannot be stressed enough.

You also need to make sure that you’re using a web host that support FTP (file transfer protocol.) Most people want their web host to support FTP because it’s this protocol that allows many different computers to access their website at the same time. However, it’s even more important for commercial websites because it allows for more advanced features to be placed on the site. Things such as shopping carts are an absolute necessity on so many commercial websites; and it’s FTP that allows it to be there.

The chances are good that you’ve already started thinking about what you need out of your commercial web host. But making absolute sure that you have the above features (or don’t have them if you don’t need them) is the first step in making sure that you get the very best commercial web host for you and your business.