Today, when you purchase a domain, they also offer to host along with various other services. It wasn’t always like this; a company used to be more niche and specialize in one specific component of running a website. Price matters, but do you want to take a risk just to save a dollar? There are a few things you should consider when deciding the best hosting and domain service providers for your site. Give some thought to the following; What is their customer service like? What happens if you forget to renew your domain? What is the grace period, and do you have to spend hundreds if you miss that grace period just to get your domain back? Also, if you plan to buy additional domains, how easy are they to manage and transfer in/out in case you decide to switch.
A lot of consolidation has occurred in the web hosting business, and big players have emerged that offer exceptional value for the dollar – but that comes at a cost. With larger companies, your website idea must function within their cookie-cutter settings or you risk being booted off the system, or worse, having technical issues that could lead to downtime, errors, or slow connectivity. Small or large, if these companies allocate the right resources per x number of servers, in support and hardware, a better experience should result. Can they provide the type of support you require? And at the very least, how well does their website function?
Most hosting companies also provide an email service that will forward to your Outlook/Google email, so that it functions under your domain name at no extra cost. Email options are slim between two tech giants (Microsoft and Google), but they also excel at getting your mail in/out. If your website went down, your email would still process as it’s not going through your server. Or the other way around. These downtimes should not occur often, and you may never catch it as it will probably be short-lived. But why take chances?
Now last, but not least, are backups. Most hosting providers offer local backups. Some also offer external backup packages. For extra safety, do both, and also download it to your specified storage site – you can link OneDrive and Google drive to automatically download your server/website backups on a scheduled basis. It is not uncommon for computers to fail, but having a solid backup plan will give you extra peace of mind.