Melanie Purkis 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, it becomes even more important to choose the right provider to host your website.
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.
Key points
- Enterprise web hosting provides dedicated resources and infrastructure for mission-critical applications. It ensures business continuity through redundant systems and disaster recovery.
- High availability features include load balancing across multiple servers. Uptime guarantees typically exceed 99.9% through Service Level Agreements.
- Security measures encompass DDoS protection and Web Application Firewalls. Compliance certifications address requirements for HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2.
- Managed services handle server configuration and maintenance. Expert support teams provide 24/7 assistance with dedicated account managers.
What is enterprise web hosting?
Enterprise hosting is a managed service that includes complete infrastructure for large-scale organizations that use the web for mission-critical operations. Enterprise web hosting provides dedicated server resources exclusively for your organization.
The main types of web hosting include shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting. Shared hosting divides server resources among multiple users. VPS hosting provides virtualized dedicated resources. Dedicated hosting offers an entire physical server. Cloud hosting distributes resources across multiple servers. Enterprise hosting combines dedicated resources with managed services and high availability.
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.” Unlike shared or VPS hosting, dedicated resources prevent performance degradation from other users. Organizations receive guaranteed CPU, RAM, and bandwidth allocations.
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.
Enterprise hosting supports mission-critical applications, including ERP systems, CRM platforms, and e-commerce operations. These applications require guaranteed uptime for business continuity.
Avoiding degradation 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:
Performance
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 necessary for website performance.
Consider these resource allocations:
- CPU allocation: Dedicated processors handle computational tasks.
- Memory resources: RAM enables simultaneous process execution.
- Storage technology: SSD drives provide rapid data access.
- Network bandwidth: High-speed connections support traffic volumes.
Choose a hosting provider that uses the latest technology (like SSDs for storage) and offers you the best server resources according to your website requirements. For enterprise WordPress support, ensure your provider specializes in platform-specific optimization.
Security
It’s also important to know what security features a web hosting company offers. There are many advanced tools like secure sockets layer (SSL certificates), daily backups, malware scanning, and others, that are critical for the performance of your website.
Enterprise security encompasses threat protection, compliance certifications, and data governance. DDoS protection mitigates distributed denial-of-service attacks. Web Application Firewalls block malicious traffic patterns. Intrusion detection systems monitor for unauthorized access attempts.
Compliance certifications validate adherence to industry regulations. Enterprise hosting providers maintain SOC 2 Type II certification for security controls. HIPAA compliance enables healthcare data processing. PCI DSS certification allows payment card handling. Learn more about enterprise data security best practices.
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.
Expert support
Customer service is 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.
Managed enterprise hosting includes infrastructure administration and maintenance. Providers handle operating system updates and security patches. Server monitoring operates continuously to detect issues. These managed services allow organizations to focus on core business operations.
Read online reviews about web hosting in addition to giving hosting providers a trial run. It will give you an idea about the quality and support of the web hosting company.
Scalability
Scalability is one of the most important factors to keep in mind. While considering options, ensure that the hosting can scale with your website.
Service Level Agreements guarantee specific performance metrics. Enterprise hosting SLAs typically ensure 99.9% or higher uptime availability. A 99.9% SLA permits 43 minutes of monthly downtime. Business continuity requires redundant systems and disaster recovery capabilities. Enterprise operations require these guarantees for business continuity.
For example, your website may require more resources during sudden surges in traffic, such as during peak user sessions or sales. This can happen during events like a product launch or holiday season sales, like Black Friday.
Confirm your hosting company is able to handle 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 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.
For robust protection, explore our enterprise network security solutions.
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.
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. Consider enterprise WordPress hosting for content-heavy sites.
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.
Why 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 your website, your reputation, and your budget.
Enterprise web hosting is a fully managed hosting service that provides high-performance infrastructure for large organizations.
Liquid Web brings almost three decades of premium web hosting experience to your enterprise needs. We’ve helped brands like Home Depot expand their online presence and boost online revenue. Our expert support teams are available 24/7/365, our security is unbeatable, and we boast the highest uptime rates in the industry.
Explore enterprise hosting options or start a chat with one of our experts today.