When it comes to setting up a website for your business, one of the most important aspects is web hosting. Often times, this essential infrastructure is a last minute thought with most just opting for whatever cheap hosting they find in their search engine.
97 cents for 10 years hosting? Sign me up baby!
As with a lot of things, the cheapest option is not always the best option. Below are a few things you should be aware of before signing up for your next cheap web hosting deal.
Slow Loading Times
We all get annoyed when we have to wait for a website to load. The fact of the matter is, this issue is really important now that search engines like Google will penalise a slow loading website because it provides a poor experience to the end user.
These days, people are extremely busy and don’t have time to wait around for slow loading sites, so they’ll just leave your site and find another site to get the information or purchase the particular product they were looking for. This negatively impacts your ‘bounce rate’ on your site analytics.
Shared hosting is usually (though not always) one of the main culprits for slow loading times. Shared Hosting is when your hosting company shares the resources amongst as many sites as they can fit on a server. The problem is, the bandwidth is shared between all the sites on that server, so if there is one site that is hogging a high percentage of the bandwidth, other sites end up suffering as the remaining bandwidth needs to be shared between those sites.
Downtime
If you want to sell your products and services through your website, your website needs to be online.
Every second your site is down costs you money in lost sales and conversions and if the site is down regularly, your search engine rankings will suffer because the search engines will class your site as a ‘low quality’ site, pushing you down the search results.
Make sure that your host offers a guaranteed uptime – most good hosts offer a 99% uptime. But don’t just take their word for it, check online reviews from other users.
Cheap hosting can be very insecure
Your website security needs to be bullet-proof! If your web host is not offering security features such as SSL Certificates, Advanced Firewall, Intrusion Detection & Protection Services, Virus & Malware Protection as part of their offering, you are at risk of your website being hacked and losing important information.
It’s always important to research the security features your host offers as part of their standard packages, especially if you’re running an online store where you may have sensitive customer information also stored on the server.
Technical Support
Ideally, the customer service & technical support teams should be reachable at any time of the day or night. It’s an unfortunate fact that technical issues can strike at any time and if you can only get in touch with technical support during business hours, this could leave your site offline for hours, impacting your business’ bottom line. A good web hosting company will have access to technical and customer support 24/7 including holidays.
Having your website hosted by a company that values your business is essential to keeping your website updated and online. If you’re struggling to get good customer service from your web hosting company, it might be time to re-evaluate and look at moving to a company that provides you with a superior support service.
Here at Nightowl Design Studio, we have been using and recommending Cloudways* for the past 12 months. Cloudways use a variety of different hosting setups to suit your needs and have hosting plan offers to cover a range of different situations and requirements at very competitive prices.
If you have any questions or would like to look into Cloudways for hosting your website, contact us and we’d be happy to give you some guidance to help you get started.
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