How to Choose Enterprise Web Hosting For Larger Websites

Posted on by Melanie Purkis | Updated:
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Finding reputable and high-quality web hosting is always a critical job because everything, like scaling and success of an online business, depends on it. No business can succeed online with low-quality web hosting. If you’re an enterprise-level business or have a (larger) enterprise-level website, then it becomes more important to choose the right provider to host your website. 

Smaller web hosting plans can’t help you grow your website because they are unable to serve thousands of visitors due to limited resources and features. That’s why you need enterprise web hosting that can serve thousands of visitors every second and can scale as your website grows.

If you are considering moving to Enterprise Hosting for your complex website or application, there are several factors that you should consider to help you choose the best enterprise hosting for your business.

What is Enterprise Web Hosting?

Web hosting that meets the requirements of enterprise businesses (able to host high-traffic sites) is called enterprise web hosting.

Enterprise-level businesses have larger websites with thousands of web pages that receive millions of visitors each month. Shared hosting and VPS hosting can’t handle that much traffic. And as a result, the website becomes slow, goes down, or starts showing errors such as “Server Connection lost.” 

Even dedicated servers, if not tuned precisely for your website, may experience degradation in user experience due to heavy server resource demands. And even if they can keep up, dedicated hosting certainly does not have redundancy or load balancing built in to share the load with additional servers like when using a web server cluster.

Avoiding these kinds of issues requires a high-end web hosting environment that uses the latest infrastructure, high-quality servers, and features to host and run an enterprise website smoothly. This kind of web hosting plan satisfies the high-end requirements of enterprise websites and gives them the security and ability to scale and accommodate as many visitors as they want. 

What to Look For in Enterprise Web Hosting for a High-Traffic Website

Here are some important factors that you should consider when choosing an enterprise web hosting provider:

Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important factors to keep in mind. While considering options, you should ensure that the hosting can scale with your website. For example, your website may require more resources during sudden surges in traffic, such as during peak user sessions or sales. Sudden surges in traffic can be much higher during events like a product launch or holiday season sales like Black Friday.

So, you should ask or confirm with your hosting company if they are able to handle the traffic surges and sudden load on servers. If they can't or you have doubts about the hosting, then you should move to another, more reliable and performant provider. 

Also, ask them what will happen if you exceed the allotted resources like bandwidth, CDN (cloud delivery network), or disk space. Will they upgrade your plan (server configuration), or charge an additional fee only for the extra consumption?

Truly scalable hosting always meets your enterprise needs and only charges for the resources that you use.

Liquid Web can help your business infrastructure scale horizontally and vertically.

Server Resources

Server resources like bandwidth, RAM, CPU, and disk (storage) space play an important role in the smooth functioning of a website during peak traffic loads. Having enough resources is better for website performance. That’s why you should choose hosting that uses the latest technology (like SSDs for storage) and offers you the best server resources according to your website requirements.

Liquid Web uses the latest technologies such as Intel Xeon processors, SSD storage, Cisco Firewalls, and others which provide high performance and security and optimize the usage of server resources.

Data Center Location

The location of the hosting data centers impacts the website load time. It can also impact the SEO of your enterprise website. Google uses server location as a signal for website geo-targeting and website load time as ranking signals.

If your hosting servers are located in a different region of the world, your website will probably experience a delay in the delivery of content. For example, if your website is targeting the United States, you should host the site in US data centers rather than an Asian hosting data center.

Liquid Web manages more than 25,000+ servers (10+ data centers) in the United States and Europe. We privately own and manage all our data centers. Our team of experts manages and monitors the network performance and security 24/7/365.

Additional Features

It is also important to know what additional features a web hosting company offers. There are many advanced tools like CDN, load balancers, secure sockets layer (SSL certificates), daily backups, malware scanning, and others that are critical for the performance of your website. 

Liquid Web hosting comes with a lot of features that are critical to your digital growth, like free SSLs, load balancers, backups, and much more.

Customer Service

Customer service is also an important factor to consider while choosing web hosting. Of course, you should prefer a company that takes its customers and issues seriously and responds quickly. If the provider doesn’t offer good support, you should consider another, no matter how performant the service is.

It’s advisable to read online reviews about web hosting in addition to giving them a trial run. It will give you an idea about the quality and support of the web hosting company. 

Liquid Web provides 24/7/365 expert support to our customers and guarantees a response in just 59 seconds or less via live chat or phone.

Pricing

Budget is a critical factor when choosing a web hosting provider, and having a good budget can help you find the best option. 

You need to understand your requirements and website level to find the best web hosting for your business. These kinds of questions can help you:

  • How much traffic is your website getting each month?
  • What is your target country? Or do you have a global audience?
  • What kind of content do you publish the most on your website?
  • How much access do you need on the server? 
  • What level of security does your website require?
  • Do you have your own team to manage everything, or do you want a hosting company to manage for you?

Find some hosting companies accordingly and compare them to choose the best option to fit your enterprise needs. 

Current Clients

The easy method to find a high-quality hosting company is to check its current customers. If you see big, reputable names, there are solid chances that you’re choosing a good provider.

Check for a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) with your next web host. It is a good measure of the company’s customer satisfaction.

Choose Liquid Web

Finding the right web hosting for an enterprise website requires research. The right plan will work as the backbone of your digital growth while choosing the wrong one can ruin everything from your website to your reputation as well as waste your time and money. You can save both time and effort by choosing Liquid Web.

Liquid Web manages everything for your business. Our Solution Architects will build a custom solution according to your enterprise needs. We’ll migrate your data and work with your team to manage and grow your website. We use the latest technologies like Server Clusters and VMware Private Cloud. And we back our promise with the 1,000% SLA uptime remedy guarantee.

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About the Author

Melanie Purkis

Melanie Purkis is the Director of Liquid Web's Managed Hosting Products & Services. Melanie has more than 25 years of experience with professional leadership, project management, process development, and technical support experience in the IT industry.

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