Web Hosting, Do You Need It? – Web Design & Digital Marketing Agency

Don’t Start Web Hosting Off On The Wrong Foot?

As a business owner, you want your business to be all wool and a yard wide among the competitive target market on the web. But getting your ideas, information, or services in front of the audience searching for your business alike online can be daunting and oftentimes at cross-purposes if the needs and wants of the intending customers never met. So starting off on the wrong foot with bad web hosting and irrelevant  are the first impression you need to set right before spending a penny further on any online campaign.

Do I Need Web Hosting?

I have a domain hosted on GoDaddy or IONOS already, so I don’t need any information. OK, I get it. How about asking yourself some questions such as the reliability of the web hosting provider, hosting infrastructure (turnkey solution or complete web hosting solution), how secure is the operating system, any backup to restore your data when trouble looms, is the control panel user friendly and easily accessible and so forth.

Making Up Your Mind

Would you consider these factors before spending a penny on any website campaign or dabble with the reality and gamble away your first impression with the potential customers at the expense of web hosting poor choice. Well, my guess would be, NO.

Breaking The Barriers

Remember, most companies today strive to make their marketing operation more efficient and their return on marketing investment more measurable. But to get the best shot at these measures, you need a good working relationship between well-organized web hosting and closely connected domain name to launch a long-lasting and, the last gasp building a formidable brand online.

So what is web hosting, and how do I know I have chosen the right one and not barking on the wrong tree?

Choosing A Web Hosting Provider

Web hosting is simply a web hosting provider or host to your documents, serving a set of files or documents to people online remotely. When your files are accessed by people remotely on the internet via a unique URL address (the domain), then you have those documents hosted on a server somewhere in a specific IP location (shared or dedicated).

Web hosting acquisition comes in different forms namely: 

1. Turnkey Solutions

The turnkey solution enables you to set up your business online for free, and this free package includes a free domain and hosting of the site. If you are looking for web space for a hobby or something not so serious, this is a great option. Though the turnkey idea can be attractive and appealing at first, important cons you must pay attention to are, you do not have:

2. Paid Hosting

Paid hosting is an ideal choice for small business owners, gig workers, and medium-size commercial enterprises seeking to establish an impressive and result-driven brand presence online. This solution should come with unlimited subdomains, unlimited databases, and professional emails with a unique domain.

In order to reach any audience, a hosting service must include some essential features like dual-platform technology, DDoS protection, scalable performance to deal with increasing traffic surge, backup and restore capability, HTTP/2 protocol, wildcard SSL, state of the art CDN (content delivery network), control panel, and optimize memory limit for a future performance boost, and enhanced CPU resources to power the hosting solution.

Although making the right choice for your web hosting isn’t enough if the hosting provider is not reliable. So, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of web hosting reliability and what you need to look out for.

Hosting Provider Reliability

Many web hosting providers would tout that you have a 99 percent or 100 percent up-time running solution. But, trust me, there are no such things as servers running 24/7 and 365 days without downtime. The reality is that the operating web servers need to be maintained. As a result, it might require the server to go offline intermittently, at least for a considerable short time. What matters are, the web hosting provider should provide how long this interruption would last and the loading time of the entire site before it returns to normal.

So how do you avoid this bait and switch practice when buying a web hosting from unknown web hosting providers for your business online .

Fact About Web Hosting Providers & What to Watch Out For

Being able to predict the downtime and up-time on any web hosting provider can be helpful. Doing so can influence the keeping and growth of loyal customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value when it matters.

Frequent accidental outages or drops in speed will for sure happen to any host at some point, so the critical questions are:  How frequently do outages happen, how long do they last, and when do they happen?

#1. Up-time and Downtime

Web Hosting Performance Tracker

Of course, accidental outages or drops in speed are inevitable. A site reputation could survive this for a couple of minutes, at least 3 to 4 times a year. But if these unwholesome conditions persist for over 5 to 10 times a week during the peak period, your website develops a bad reputation, not to mention lost revenue.

Remember, satisfaction reflects a person’s judgment of a product’s perceived performance in relation to expectation. So if the performance of the web hosting falls short of expectation, the customer is disappointed and would hurt your business very badly. What you want is to match the customer expectations with the reliable performance of the web hosting provider.

You may also check the fine print to understand what kind or amount of downtime qualifies for the guarantee—most don’t include planned downtime. 

#2. How Secure is My Web Hosting

One of the most critical factors to watch out for is the security of your website. You want to ensure the hosting provider is equipped with DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection. This feature safeguards your website from incoming attacks and keeps you online. Check if the hosting provider has the feature that enables you to backup your data automatically and let you recover files from restore points if anything is deleted or lost accidentally.

#3. How Much Storage or Bandwidth is Provided

You need to be aware of a specific limit in the bandwidth and storage space. The hosting provider should have the option to adjust the performance of your web project at any time. Scalable performance management must be in place whenever there is a surge in traffic and the number of files uploaded to the site.

#4. Know What The Shared Hosting Entails

Shared hosting is one of the best options out there for small businesses or corporate enterprises. It has become the ideal choice due to its ease of use, performance, scalability, ease of customization, and price. But, the downside is that you share a single server with many other businesses..

The problem associated with this is the disruption of the server and poor security system or malware existence in one of the accounts on a single server. The severance can be damaging if the hosting provider does not have the infrastructure to combat these security holes. Ask the hosting provider to check if there is any policy for limiting sites on any one server.

#5. Do Some Digging of Your Own On Hosting Providers

Another way to verify the reliability of any hosting provider is to check for the provider’s recent reviews from trusted review sites (Trustpilot) and see what their clients are saying about the up-time and downtime, any recent attacks, and limits. Ignore the service provider’s heavy marketing or any bare-bones up-sell or cross-sell on their site. 

#6. How Reliable is Their Customer Service

If you need help and can not get one, that is a red flag. To avoid this, do some digging on the service provider site and check if they have direct support, video tutorial, contextual help screens, knowledge base, and sometimes real-time chat customer service system in place. If these features are missing, it’s time you moved on.

Customer Help Center

Note, improving the quantity and quality of any marketing intelligence starts with the choice you make with your hosting, and can in fact impact the way your visitors are motivated either to take action favourable or skew from your site in a split-second.

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