Despite the growing influence of social media, most online users will visit a company’s website first in order to discover more about the brand and its products or services. With any luck, they’ll end up making a purchase too.
But in recent years, several companies have given design and content greater precedence than hosting, which could turn out to be a big mistake if, for example, you do not have enough bandwidth to cope with increasing traffic numbers.
However, choose a suitable and sufficient solution for your needs, such as 100TB Dedicated Servers, and this worst-case scenario will never come to fruition. But what are some other reasons why choosing the right hosting for your business is so important?
Boosting reputations and revenue
Seeing as the internet is one big marketplace, where consumers can browse and buy products whenever they want, your website needs to be available and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to capitalise on potential sales.
However, if you suffer from prolonged periods of downtime due to a web host that can’t meet your demands, customers will soon lose patience. Furthermore, they will probably visit an industry rival instead, damaging your reputation and revenue to an even greater extent.
Two years ago, Amazon’s website went down for about 40 minutes, which was reported to have cost the retail giant an estimated $4.72 million in lost sales.
Security for both you and your customers
Following the high-profile cyber attack on TalkTalk, which claimed the personal details of around 157,000 customers, more and more companies are prioritising web security.
This should start with your choice of host, as providers are able to backup all of your data to a remote server and make everything easier to recover in the event of a hacking incident.
Even if you are not particularly familiar with protecting your vital online assets, most hosting companies will also have technical support to lend a helping hand with data management and web security whenever you need it most.
Enhancing online visibility and awareness
Before any customer makes a purchase from your website, they will need a reason to visit in the first place. A common tactic being employed by several brands is content marketing, which provides online users with interesting articles, entertaining videos or other engaging mediums.
The ultimate goal of content marketing is to achieve favorable search engine rankings. But if your website is constantly down, search engines won’t be able to crawl, index, and rank it accordingly.
On top of that, various SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts say that slow server speed can also have an adverse impact on your results page ranking. So, your choice of host could be the difference between prominent and poor online visibility.
But when it comes to finally settling for a hosting solution, try to find a provider that meets your requirements, can guarantee server uptime of at least 99 per cent, is able to accommodate future growth, and has a glowing reputation.