Let's start by looking at some numbers, how many businesses are actually online and need a web hosting company? According to Statista.com the number of businesses 
with websites in the U.K. rose from 70% in 2007 to 82% in 2012. Let's not even talk about the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Today even the smallest businesses recognize and appreciate the necessity of having a website as they realize that's where growing numbers of customers are engaging with them. So if every business needs a website how do you choose the best web hosting company to host your website?
There are dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of Web hosting providers out there. Trying to choose between them can be overwhelming. Many beginning Web designers or business owners start out with only one criteria - the host must be cheap or free. But most people find that the cheapest hosts offer drawbacks that slightly more costly hosts don't have. A little planning and investigation can save a lot of hassle down the road.
People tend to choose a web hosting provider because of cost i.e. the web host pricing is cheap, and they leave a web host because of atrocious support. Moving to another web host can be a real pain as it's moving a website, emails, downtime etc.
Generous bandwidth quota's is important with multimedia increasing bandwidth can be consumed in huge quantities by your website visitors.
Gone are the days of a website being a page or two with some text and pictures. Today's websites include videos, high resolution pictures, interactivity of all kinds to engage visitors and provide a pleasant enjoyable experience. All this has to be hosted on a web server's hard drive somewhere. Having generous web space in your hosting account means you can grow your website and add features without worrying about running out of space.
This goes hand in hand with the previous two points, if you need to upgrade (or downgrade for some reason) a web hosting providing easy upgrades means your hosting will grow with you and some hosting company even offer 1-click upgrades to make things even easier. Red Hippo even offers easy instant upgrades from our Web Hosting accounts to VPS (Virtual Private Server) accounts and Hybrid Servers which means if your website ever outgrows it's web hosting account you can upgrade to your own server with the click of a button and no configuration necessary on your part.
1-click install of software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Concrete5, phpBB, Moodle etc. And also 1-click installs of eCommerce shopping carts like PrestaShop, osCommerce, ZenCart etc. make starting a website or an online store as easy as clicking a button. A hosting account must support features like private SSL certificates to protect website and customer data. Red Hippo even offers a smartphone control panel to enable you to manage your web hosting control panel on the go.
Need to create new emails accounts for a new employee or forward email to multiple email accounts? Or access your your website via FTP to easily upload files? The best web hosting company will have an easy to use control panel to quickly and easily manage every aspect of your hosting account.
Just about every web hosting company proclaims loudly that it has a 99% up-time guarantee. This is not always the case and when their servers go down, so does your website which means loss of visitors, no email etc. which can be damaging to your bottom line and adversely affect the public's perception of your company. Red Hippo has a 99.99% up-time guarantee and our servers even come with an SLA (Service Level Agreement) to ensure your website is never down.
We have carefully designed our web hosting with bespoke software and state of the art hardware to ensure the best quality that's easy to use.
Get started today, you'll love it!
