7 reasons why good website hosting is essential.
Web hosting is where you rent a space on a server to store all the data and files needed for your website to run, and it’s worth thinking carefully about the investment you make as a poor host can impact on your website’s performance and credibility with search engines and customers.
When looking for a good web host, you need to choose a reliable service which offers a high guaranteed uptime and can provide quick loading times—especially as research has proven that visitors will only wait 3 seconds for a website to load before abandoning their search.
By investing in good web hosting, you know all the time the web designers have spent on optimising your business’s website for SEO and user experience hasn’t been wasted.
While there are plenty of services available that offer cheaper hosting, these servers are often cramped with multiple users and websites, meaning resources, such as bandwidth, are shared and limited.
Who you choose as your host can affect how your website ranks in the search engines. Although good hosting doesn’t guarantee high organic rank positions, it does ensure you have the right foundations to work from.
Here are some factors you can benefit from:
Security — having a security certificate and a low percentage of website downtime are important for search results and how your site is ranked. If your website is always down, it can’t be crawled, and this can cause you to lose organic traffic and stop your pages from being indexed.
Performance — Google uses user behaviour data to ascertain the quality of a site. If your site loads too slowly, visitors can become frustrated and leave, which sends negative signals to Google and can affect search ranking.
Location — as search engines look at location-based signals when searching for results, location plays an important factor in SEO. If your business and its users are UK based, you’ll want it to be hosted in a UK data centre. A good hosting provider can guarantee your website is hosted locally, ensuring data doesn’t have to travel far and responds quickly.
To retain visitors to your website and keep your bounce rate down, you need to ensure it loads quickly, with limited glitches and lags.
Visitor experience matters, not just because Google uses the performance of your site as a metric to rank it, but for sales and conversion. You can combat this in part with a bespoke website design, but also with who you choose to host your website.
A good host will ensure you have a high loading speed with the required bandwidth to ensure your website loads quickly, so you don’t lose visitors or revenue.
Your website host will usually automatically monitor your website, alerting you when things aren’t running as expected. This can include the server or website going ‘down’, potential issues relating to fluctuating traffic and other problems.
A professional host will act on these alerts quickly, understanding the risks and effects it has when it is down. Our team at Purpose Media are instantly alerted when something isn’t responding as it should, with a member of the team investigating as soon as possible.
As many websites can exist on the same server, if one of these other websites gets a surge in traffic, it could slow yours down. A host provider should also check the content of neighbouring websites and their purpose, so it doesn’t affect your credibility—otherwise, it could negatively impact your trustworthiness and Google ranking.
A good web host will offer options to you. At Purpose Media, we look at whether having your own dedicated server or being one of the few select websites hosted on a shared server, will suit you best.
A professional host will both protect and back up your site and data, so if you have a problem, it can quickly be restored to a previous version.
Equally, there may be a time when you need a manual backup of a certain version of your site, which your website host will be able to help with.
By choosing a good host provider you’ll often receive security features which protect your site, making it less likely for you to be hacked or breached.
Typically, a trustworthy host will run regular security scans to ensure your site’s defences are strong and everything is protected. Equally, if any issues are detected, they’ll get these fixed and sorted as soon as possible.
If you encounter a problem, you usually have a main point of contact who will resolve your issue as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
At Purpose Media, we ensure each client has an account manager who will aim to respond within four hours during UK business hours. We also offer out-of-hours support, so we are always available to help.
The only thing worse than your website going down is having a poor hosting team who won’t be able to support you through it. Not only could you lose information, database and revenue, but your reputation too.
If you don’t have the technical skills in-house, you need your website host to turn to when catastrophe strikes, so you can get back up and running. This is made even easier if you’re hosting with your website developer, who knows your website better than anyone.
In most cases, including at Purpose Media, this level of support is included within a web hosting package allowing us to become an external member of your business team. In this situation, you’re not just paying to keep your website data secure but for ongoing, round-the-clock support.
At Purpose Media, our servers are cloud-based and dedicated to us as a full-service agency. This means you’ll only pay for the server space used and we can scale the hosting up or down to meet your needs.
If you choose to have both web design and hosting with us, we are able to make changes and updates more easily. Our web design team can create you a bespoke website with a tailored customer relationship management system to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions, for both current and potential customers.
Alongside this design, our developers will ensure any integrations look and feel like part of your website.
If you’re interested in learning more about our web hosting services for your business website, get in touch with us today.