You Have Just Completed Your Website And Its Ready To Go Live, But Where Will You Host It?
Wieting Design a website and graphic design agency based in Fairfield County CT believes most savvy business owners utilize websites and blogs to promote their business to engage with current clients and to reach new ones. Hosting is part of that process because you need a reliable hosting company to keep your website safe, keep it running fast and prevent hackers. In my experience, most small businesses end up making the wrong choice due to expense not realizing the importance of a good hosting company.
What Happens When You Go With A Less Expensive Hosting Company?
As a business, one of your most important priorities is maximizing profits, right? Choosing the wrong hosting company can have a negative effect on your income due to down times, slow loading times and most important the overall security of you’re website. Here are some negatives that can happen when you don’t choose the right hosting company.
Loss Of Revenue
If your site goes down, your potential customers will not be able to view your website to learn about your products and services. Even worse, if you host an online store, you will lose out on potential sales and income because the user will go to another website. In March 2015, a 12-hour Apple store outage cost the company $25 million.
Negative Effect On Your SEO Ranking
Your goal with content marketing is to rank high so customers can find you. If your site is down repeatedly not only will it give you a lot of headaches but when search engines are attempting to visit, your ranking will be affected due to downtimes and slow loading times.
Security And Malware Attacks
In todays world there is no perfect solution for keeping hackers out. But a reputable web hosting company will back up your data to a remote server making it easy to restore your website in case your site is hacked. They will also assist you with technical support, maintenance and security issues 24 hours a day.
Security on your website should be top notch. If your hosting company is not offering features such as firewall technology, antivirus software and anti-malware applications, you run the risk of losing all of your information or getting hacked. Cheaper web host companies will not offer security applications leaving your site open to being hacked on the Internet.
Go with a hosting company that offers you the best security because if you’re running an online store, you have your customer’s data on it so you want to keep that secure. If that data gets into the wrong hands it could be catastrophic to your customer.
Poor Customer Service
The customer service for your web hosting should be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. That last thing you want if you have an issue is to have to go through submitting job tickets and waiting hours or even days to get it resolved. Whether its a question about the billing adware, viruses or other problems on your site you want a customer service rep right there to help you. If you cannot get in touch with your web host company’s customer service department, it’s probably time to go with a new web hosting company.
Slow Load Times
The amount of time that it takes for your website to load can be a determining factor in whether or not customers convert over to sales. There is nothing more annoying than waiting for a website to load. If your competitors website loads fast that is where that potential customer will end up. Chances are if it’s taking your site too long to load there’s not enough bandwidth across the host server. Cheaper web hosting companies will sell shared hosting packages to multiple websites and bog down the processors and amount of bandwidth across the server making the websites slow. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, change your web host company.
There are a lot of web hosting companies out there. It’s crucial to select a hosting provider carefully since your business will be depend on it. Do your homework.
Remember that choosing a hosting provider because its cheaper is not worth the hassle and headaches if your site goes down.
How Much Should You Pay For A Good Hosting Company?
Quick answer: A shared web host is usually cheap – expect to pay $3 – $10 per month; VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting on the other hand costs $30 – $80 per month. Paying between $50.00 – $80.00 a month (depending on your website) is worth it if you want your website protected.
Questions To Ask If Your Looking For A Hosting Company On Your Own
- What kind of server reliability and uptime scores do you offer?
- What is your security policy?
- Do you offer a range of hosting offers?
- Do you provide SSL?
- Do you provide multiple add-on domains?
- What’s your downtime history?
- What is your back-up policy?
- What are you accountable for in terms of an outage?
- Do you offer the latest web hosting technology for both Linux (cPanel) and Microsoft Windows?
- Is your web hosting service easy to use?
- Do you offer free web site migration assistance?
- Will I get notifications if my website has vulnerabilities?
There are many kinds of web hosting, all at different price points and offering different features and options. You need to find not only the right features and price, but also choose a reputable company. The right combination can lead to a lifetime of bliss, but the wrong one can end up costing you money and headaches.
Website Hosting Connecticut | Full-Service Marketing Agency | CT, NY, NJ
Wieting Design is a full-service design agency in Fairfield County, CT and serving all of Connecticut (CT). We are committed to sharing our experience and expertise in website development, website design, graphic design, search engine marketing (SEM & SEO), and video production to help build powerful tools that work for your Connecticut business. Whether your objective is to grow your reputation, create client loyalty, drive traffic to your website, or set up a marketing strategy, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide. View our services here or Contact us to learn more.
