So you’ve gathered all of your content, designed a beautiful website, optimized it for search, and you’re ready to go live. Now the question is: What should I look for in my web hosting service? And how can I compare the range of web hosting providers available?

The answers vary based on the specific needs of your website, including where your audience is, how much traffic you expect, and a bunch of other factors. But at the end of the day, the four most important components for evaluating a hosting service are:

Speed
Reliability
Scalability
Security
So let’s take a closer look at each of those dimensions.

Speed: “How much is my website loading time?”

Evaluating a hosting service’s speed means measuring how much is your website loading time and how quickly your content loads in your site visitors’ browsers, no matter where they are. If your site’s files are hosted on just one server, in one place, then visitors will see slower and slower page loads the further they are from your server.

The solution is to store and distribute your assets in a content distribution network (CDN). A CDN distributes your files throughout data centers worldwide, then delivers them to visitors via the data center that’s closest to them. This means snappy page loads for all your visitors worldwide.

Greensoft distributes your site files through a global CDN to ensure fast page loads for all your visitors worldwide.
Of course, we wanted to make sure your website loading time is as small as possible for people across the globe, so we took it a step further by using not one but two CDNs:

1-Fastly

2-Amazon Web Services (AWS)

How we use Fastly to accelerate your time to first byte (TTFB)

The first CDN we use, Fastly, delivers your HTML documents. Speed is key with that first document because it tells the browser which image, CSS, and JavaScript files it needs next, which is why we use a second CDN. At green soft, we’ve striven to optimize the time to first byte (TTFB) because it’s the biggest factor in visitor experience and website loading time.

Page speed tools often overlook this, but there’s good reason to believe that it actually affects your website loading time and its rankings: According to a Moz article, there’s a correlation between lower TTFB and higher search engine rankings — yet another reason we’ve focused so much on this vital metric.

How we use Amazon Web Services to accelerate website loading time

Our second CDN, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloudfront, delivers your site’s assets to you from even more locations (or, PoPs, for “Points of Presence”). This ensures that images and videos will also load extremely quickly.
Our Business hosting plan takes that even further, giving you access to three times the number of PoPs as our other hosting plans.

Scalability: “Will my site crash if it goes viral?”

Will your site be able to handle tons of traffic and maintain its highest website loading time? Or will your server fall over when it gets too many requests? This is the core question for scalability: What happens when your site traffic increases? The best services handle this by automatically spinning up servers as your traffic ebbs and flows so that you can handle any amount of traffic. This is exactly what greensoft hosting does; with a little help from Fastly, Amazon EC2.greensoft hosts several sites that get over a million page views a month without a hitch! fast-web-hosting

Reliability: “Will I have to deal with downtime?”

A website that fails to load is useless. So look for a service that guarantees 99.99% reliability because outages are a pain (and damage your brand).“Cheap” hosting can often be highly unreliable — and ironically expensive to your brand — since your files are often stored in shared hosting space, which can go offline if your server neighbors see unexpected spikes in traffic. We pride ourselves on our uptime. Last year we only had 1 minute of total downtime, which translates to 99.999% uptime. Check out status.greensoft.com to see our historical performance.

Security & HTTPS/SSL

Ever notice the difference between sites with a URL that starts with HTTP:// and those that start with HTTPS://? That S stands for “secure” and indicates that all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted with an SSL certificate. Today, some browsers may still show the “HTTPS://” part of your domain in the address bar, while others like Chrome will display a lock icon.

What else should I consider?

While speed, reliability, scalability, and security should be your chief concerns, greensoft offers a host (pun sheepishly intended) of other features that have a significant impact on SEO and performance and may not be offered by most hosting services.

HTTP/2

2015 saw the release of the first new Hypertext Transfer Protocol since 1999: HTTP/2.

This new standard promises faster websites across the web — but not all hosting platforms support it yet. Because Google has always cared about page speed, there’s a good chance that HTTP/2 will become a component of their ranking algorithm soon.

Here are some benefits of HTTP/2 support/compatibility:

Multiplexing: Your browser can receive requests over multiple connections, not just one. Think of it like switching from a one-lane road to an interstate.
Header compression: Your browser loads the top of your pages first, before the rest of the page, which means your site visitors see content faster. On mobile especially, this is a big improvement.
greensoft’s hosting has been HTTP/2 compliant for a couple of years now, unlike services out there. (And even hosts who do offer it typically only do so on higher-tier packages.)

Today, all assets published to a greensoft site are served via HTTP/2 — increasing page load performance when many assets need to be downloaded.

Other powerful features of greensoft hosting

Everything above is more or less essential, but many other features can make managing your website a lot easier and more convenient. These include:

Automatic backups and version control (you can also save and name a site version whenever you’d like with the key combo Command + Shift + S on Mac or Control + Shift + S on Windows)
Site-wide and per-page password protection
Simple publishing workflows
Responsive images
Protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
On top of these features, greensoft hosting includes:

Form submissions (manage lead gen and let us store your data for you). It’s like Wufoo, but built into greensoft!
SEO and social tools: manage OpenGraph and SEO meta tags in one convenient interface. Easily combine it with the CMS to automate your metadata optimization.
Dynamic embeds: integrate greensoft CMS with Shopify for eCommerce, SoundCloud for music, Eventbrite for events, and anything else that uses custom code embeds.
greensoft combines all these elements in a first-class global hosting infrastructure that’s available at the click of a button. This means that when you publish with greensoft, your site’s files and assets are published across the globe and immediately ready for any amount of traffic from any location.

Want to know how much we believe in greensoft hosting?

We put a lot of thought and effort into making greensoft hosting one of the best hosting services out there. We’ve seen greensoft-using businesses like Kisi grow their organic traffic by over 300% while also supporting thousands of requests per second for businesses like Eventbrite.

In fact, when Eventbrite launched their Amstel Live festival page with greensoft, they received over 10,000 requests a second — resulting in over 3,000,000 page views in just one hour. greensoft hosting was able to handle this website loading time it without a hitch.

But above all, we believe in our hosting platform so much that we use it for our own websites, which see hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe every day, and have seen nearly perfect performance over the last year.

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