5 Factors to Consider When Choosing Web Hosting Services in Malaysia
“Just like when you are purchasing a property/ house, there are a few things that you will take into consideration such as location, convenience, etc. Similarly, you would need to consider these factors when choosing a “home” for your website.”
What is Web Hosting?
Fundamentally, web hosting is an online service that makes the content of your website available on the internet. When you buy a hosting package, you are renting space on a real server to keep all of your website’s files and data. In other words, web hosting is the “Home” where your website is located.
Consider that your neighborhood is about to get a new clothing store. You’ve hired staff, acquired all of the goods you’ll sell, laid out the layout of your shop, completed your branding, and bought your POS system. However, you haven’t yet signed the tenancy for a storefront, which technically means your clothing store doesn’t yet genuinely exist in a physical location.
This is what having a website without a web hosting provider looks like. Although your domain and web page files are present, no one will be able to find your website online. Similar to this, if you don’t have the physical space, your retail store’s customers won’t have a place to go and shop.
Read here to find out more about web hosting.
5 Key Elements to Look Out for When Choosing a Web Hosting Package
Just like when you are purchasing a property/ house, there are a few things that you will take into consideration such as location, convenience, etc. Similarly, you would need to consider these factors when choosing a “home” for your website.
1) Uptime Guarantee
It’s critical to keep website downtime to a minimum. Typical expenses would include lost revenue, personnel overtime fees, and disruption of operations. There are additional expenses to take into account, such as the harm that downtime does to client confidence and search engine ranking.
It is just like your store, once in a while, there will be some maintenance needed due to unforeseen circumstances. During this time, you will need to temporarily close your store and you will definitely lose out on potential customers and revenue.
Same goes to a website hosting, where you will need to find a reliable provider that provides an uptime guarantee. This is to make sure your website or e-commerce website is always running and in business.
Facing downtime today could result in more negative outcomes than you can think! Whatever the reason, downtime costs a lot of money and time. Customers at TheGigabit can be rest assured that you have access to a 99.9% uptime guarantee, giving you peace of mind that hardware problems, DDoS assaults, or poor CMS maintenance won’t cause your website to be down for an extended period of time.
2) Speed
When a diner enters a restaurant to eat, slow service from the waiter frequently leads to negative reviews and fewer next customers. Likewise, a slow website speed can have a detrimental impact on user experience, site traffic overall, and search engine rankings.
Users may leave websites that function poorly and take a long time to load. On the other hand, sites that load rapidly often get more visitors and convert at a higher rate.
There are many factors that are affecting the loading speed of the website, such as page weight (large JavaScript files, video content, heavy CSS files, and high-definition images), poor network conditions, far hosting locations and more.
At TheGigabit, a solution known as the LiteSpeed, helps in increasing the web performance up to 47%. Now we know for a fact that it is human tendency to perceive a faster website as more reliable and professional. Start prioritizing your website speed with TheGigabit’s LiteSpeed today.
3) Clean, Nice & Simple Dashboard
Complete set of technical, security & automation tools in one panel – Linux cPanel
The hosting panel that can be viewed remotely is a bonus because your organization is operating or accessible online 24/7. What’s more, if the dashboard is simple, easy and user-friendly. Through this hosting dashboard, you may find out all about your business progress, technical and security issues about your website, even build and manage multiple websites.
Build & manage multiple sites from a single dashboard – Windows Plesk.
A good dashboard goes a long way – being able to have absolute control of the complete set of technical, security and automation tools in one panel. Check out the Linux and Windows web hosting dashboards that we have!
4) Linux vs Windows Web Hosting
Here, we’ll delve a little more into the technical aspects of web hosting. We will attempt to make the jargon explanations as clear and simple as possible in order to help you to understand the type of web hosting plans you would need.
Plesk Hosting (for Windows) and cPanel Hosting (for Linux) refers to the operating systems.
In order to know which operating system meets your needs, you first have to know the differences between these two operating systems. Generally, there are 2 major types of websites – websites with transaction, and without involvement of transaction.
- Linux Web Hosting
If your website only has minor interactions like contact form and does not require any form of transaction, then Linux Web Hosting (cPanel Hosting) is the most suitable for you. In other words, a website that is solely focusing on the end user’s browsing experience.
This is true because Linux hosting uses MariaDB, an open source database, and PHP, an open source web engine. It is appropriate for most people because it offers a multitude of features and a simple user interface that lets you fully manage your hosting. The user-friendly interface and backend system for website design is more suitable for the company’s official website or promotion page.
- Windows Web Hosting
As for websites that involve transactions such as e-commerce, game websites, membership, and web POS system (Point of Sales), Windows Web Hosting (Plesk Hosting) would be the ideal choice. This is because the Windows web engine uses ASP. NET which is more suitable for web applications that require security and functionality.
In the Windows Server environment, Microsoft has its own web server – Internet Information Services which allows users to utilize Microsoft’s built web code and database, which is ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL. Both are licensed and required subscription fees in order to utilize them.
5) Backup
Even while technology can do incredible things, it still has flaws. And nobody wants to take the chance of instantly losing all of their digital files.
Consider the effort you poured into building your website. Wouldn’t it be devastating to lose everything you’ve built? A website is, after all, at least as susceptible to dangers as a PC.
One crucial action you can take to safeguard your website is to invest in web hosting packages that have regular backups. Like the Windows Web Hosting plan that TheGigabit offers has a Self-backup Manager that allows for daily auto backup once by TheGigabit. That way, you won’t have to start over if something awful happens. Your website can easily be restored from an earlier backup.
Tips from The Gigabit Technical Team
Selection References Guide: Current vs Future Development Direction
- If your current website coding is built on ASP.NET and requires Microsoft SQL to run, then Windows Plesk Hosting is the way to go.
- Based on the nature of the business and business’s future development, do consider thoroughly your business direction before you choose to use either platform. This is because once you have committed to any one of the platforms, it cannot be substituted for the other. You might also need to redevelop everything if you need to change to either one of the platforms in the future.
- Overall, Windows web hosting will be more expensive than Linux web hosting because Windows web hosting requires a Microsoft license, but Linux is an open source platform with a variety of adjustable add-ons to increase the hosting’s capabilities.