The Best Hosting Solution: Top 3 Things To Look For

Finding the best hosting solution to fit your organization or team’s unique needs and demands can be challenging. Often, your company’s website and application delivery are the central hubs of your online business presence and are an essential channel for interacting with your clients and customers. Your digital presence, represented by your sites and apps, demands resilience, which requires that you have the best hosting solution available on the market. 

Best Hosting Solution: Speed & Flexibility, Customer Support, Monitoring & Visibility.

When searching for the best hosting solution to meet your unique needs, amazee.io recommends taking the time to discuss the following topics with your potential provider thoroughly:

Speed and Flexibility

Healthy websites and apps will be constantly changing. As your strategy changes and your business grows, lengthy deployments dependent on external teams will slow you down. We know how critical it is to have the ability to make quick changes - whenever you want or need. Your web team needs to be able to operate independently at the fastest speed possible.

The best hosting solution will accommodate quick changes, fast releases, and updates. These factors can decide an average, sound, or great digital experience for your audiences. 

A modern and forward-thinking hosting and application delivery provider should be able to offer: 

• Safe, fast deployments as often as you require (even on Fridays! 😉)
• Custom rollback processes
• Low-risk A/B testing and feature-branch environments for prototyping new ideas 
• Always ready for high-traffic events
• Proactive, predictable preventative platform maintenance 

Modern hosting platforms like amazee.io leverage containerized approaches with Kubernetes orchestration to deploy your sites and apps efficiently. Kubernetes is a great container orchestration platform, but the path to learning Kubernetes is steep. Managed Kubernetes, delivered to you as a Platform-as-a-Service, is the best option for teams wanting to leverage containers and Kubernetes without investing in Kubernetes education, building up years of experience, or hiring an expensive, specialized team. 

With a managed Kubernetes platform like Lagoon from amazee.io, developers can forget about platform operation, maintenance, and management and instead leverage automated manual processes that would otherwise consume much of their time. That means less developer time spent operating a modern platform and more time spent building valuable features and functionality for your site!  

The amazee.io-managed Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service provides the platform to automate your container deployments and manage your deployment life cycles consistently in a modern way. 

Outdated hosting platforms and legacy hosting strategies have been notoriously slow and frustrating for developers and teams due to slow communication, siloed teams, bottlenecks, and outages you weren’t even aware of due to a lack of monitoring and high-availability strategies. Using the amazee.io-managed Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service as your hosting solution will help improve your options when trying new ideas. The flexibility provided by the platform means testing a new page or deployment isn’t the all-encompassing sluggish process it used to be. 

When searching for the best hosting solution, look for and ask about features that speak to your developer’s speed and the platform’s ability to make flexible updates and changes. 

Support and Customer Service

When you need to talk to someone about your site hosting, it often must happen NOW. And generally, you want to speak to a person, not a robot. Regardless of the issue - if it’s important to you, your hosting provider should be available for these critical communications. 

Teams are too often left hanging when contacting their hosting provider, and contacting a natural person to chat one-on-one about your sites is an absolute requirement that, in our opinion, needs to be met!

When considering the best hosting solution for your business, ensuring high-quality and modern customer support and service standards should be the main priority for the team. 

The best hosting solution should be able to:

• Respond to inquiries within 24 hours (ideally less!)
• Provide 24/7/365 customer service access and availability 
• Do away with chatbots and non-human replies 
• Make you feel comfortable enough to reach out any time, for any reason 
• Provide enough visibility that you know what’s going on with your web properties anytime you want that information

This leads us to the last (but not least!) vital feature to look for in a hosting platform. 

Website Visibility and Monitoring 

We discussed the importance of speed, flexibility, quick updates and versioning, and customer support, which are vital for the best hosting solution for your team. We also established that you should be able to contact customer support for help when something goes wrong quickly. But what if you don’t know that something has gone wrong? 

The best hosting solution should always include monitoring and visibility. 

By monitoring, we mean that the hosting platform’s team is aware of any potential problems before they even occur - and in case they do occur, they must provide quick, precise, thorough, and preemptive communication. 

By visibility, we mean that there should be a way to see the status of your web applications and properties, what your team is working on and gain insight into the world of your developers. 

Part of amazee.io’s Dedicated Cloud offering provides precisely this capability for project managers (or anyone!): amazee.io’s easy-to-use UI solves the visibility problem for leaders, and Lagoon Insights can provide in-depth information about each web property and its status. 

amazee.io is ideal for security-conscious teams and those concerned about secure sites. The platform can offer visibility and reporting for all risks and vulnerabilities detected. This is done by implementing a container scanner, which generates in-depth reports on the status of your containers' software components. 

This holistic view of all web properties allows web teams to assess whether sites are secure and identify any vulnerabilities. 

amazee.io ZeroOps - The Best Hosting Solution that Checks All the Boxes

Suppose your hosting provider needs to improve in one or more of these three critical categories. Then, you have yet to find the best hosting solution for your needs. In that case, we recommend looking at other options. Your website and online presence for your organization is well worth it. 

Dedicated Cloud by amazee.io was explicitly created to solve problems for web teams with ambitious goals. Dedicated Cloud is, first and foremost, fast and flexible. It was designed to help web teams get things done and stop struggling with legacy hosting. You can think of  Dedicated Cloud as the “Platform-as-a-Service” for all your web projects, and with amazee.io managed Kubernetes, we handle all your operations. With us on ops, your developers are free to focus on their valuable application work! 

Dedicated Cloud means faster, more flexible deployments, leveraging our PaaS that works with any technology and infrastructure your team chooses to work with - True ZeroOps. 

Book a free consultation with one of our experts to learn how we can offer you the best hosting solution to help your web team thrive.