“Is my web hosting impacting my business?” If you own an online business which highly depends on your website, then you will face this question at some point.
If you’ve bought a web hosting service just by looking at its price, then get ready to pay a big sum of money for your mistake.
Web hosting impacts your business in numerous ways which result in loss of revenue.
Below listed are the points to make sure that your web hosting is not impacting your business.
Your Website Speed Is Directly Related To Your Website’s Conversion Rate
The slow speed of your website directly affects the online sales as speed is an important part of website’s user experience.
A user prefers the websites which load fast as compared to the websites which take forever to load.
Think about it, when we visit a website to buy something online and find that the website is loading really slowly, we get irritated and do not wait for it to load at every step of placing an order or doing a payment. We prefer to leave the site and visit another website to buy the product.
Speed directly impacts the sales ratio of your business.
Here are some facts….
- 40% of people prefer to leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- If your website takes 1 second more to respond, your website conversion rate drops by 7%.
- 47% of online shoppers expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds.
- Amazon stated that just one-second delay in their page loading time cost them $1.6 million in sales every year.
- Google said that even four-tenths of a second delay in their search result make them lose 8 million searches every day.
So, always makes sure that your web host provides better speed so that your website can load faster and can provide better user experience.
Also read: 5 Things You Must Check While Buying Web Hosting
You Lose 100% Of Revenue When Your Website is Down
Most business users depend on their web hosting company to take care of their website uptime.
But no company can ensure 100% uptime as maximum uptime one can provide is 99.99%.
The causes for website downtime are different including planned downtime, failure of components, malicious attacks, and natural disaster.
Even most web hosts guarantee 99.99% uptime but very few actually deliver it.
You must track your website’s uptime with services like UptimeRobot, Site24x7.
Website downtime directly affects the productivity of business and results in 100% revenue loss.
In 2016, there was an outage in United Airlines website for one few hours which resulted in a delay of flights globally and lots of flights were canceled. It impacted the organization by many million dollars and lots of unhappy customers.
In 2013, Amazon reported $66.240 loss per minute when its website was down
In 2010, Virgin Blue airline’s IT outage lasted for 11 days and cost them $20 million dollars.
Also Read: How to Choose a Web Hosting Company?
Your Web Hosting Can Affect Your Website’s Ranking in Google
In shared web hosting, you are sharing server resources with other websites hosted on the same server, including the server IP address.
If your host allows spammy or illegal websites on their servers, it directly affects your website’s position in search results.
Google considers these websites as toxic and sharing the same IP address with them affects your website’s ranking which impacts your business growth.
It is always recommended that you must ask your web host about it before your purchase web hosting from them.
Inmotion Hosting is one of such hosts which never allow such websites on their servers.
Also Read: Best Web Hosting Services
Connecting With Your Host’s Customer Support Team is Difficult
Regardless of services of web host, customer support is also crucial for your online business.
Your web host should have a strong technical support team to provide excellent services and solve all your server related issues.
It is always better to ensure whether the customer support of the web hosting company is good or not. To ensure this, search for the web host in social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter and see how actively a host is responding to customer’s queries posted them.
You can also read reviews about the host on the internet but most of the reviews you’ll find there are paid reviews.
You may also try to connect to a customer support executive before you buy a web hosting plan through chat or phone and see they are quick enough to attend you and efficient to answer your questions.
If you have a hosting account already and you face issues connecting to the support team, then you should consider switching your host.
Also Read: Cheap Asp.net Hosting for Your Windows Application
Your Web Host Doesn’t Provide Room To Grow During Seasonal Traffic Spikes
Scalability is a very important factor that you must consider while buying a hosting solution.
If you want to grow your business, then you need a web host that offer a web hosting solution for all kind of traffic need.
When you start your business, you can opt for a shared hosting account as traffic is less on your website.
As your business grows, the traffic on your website also increases and low bandwidth and fewer server resources may result in the crashing of your website.
You also experience seasonal traffic increase during any promotional sale that you run on your website. During that time you need more server resources for a short period of time, and if your host is not capable enough to provide you additional resources during that time, your website is likely to crash during the promotion period.
So, always choose a web host which provides effectively high scalability to handle the sudden traffic increase for whatever reason.
Make Sure Your Web Host Takes Security Seriously
Security of the web hosting is very important and lack of security can be devastating to any business and can result in loss of income or data loss. Most web hosts are aware of security issues and listen to demands of their customers. Your web host should take care of their servers to provide a secure environment as well as provide necessary tools to secure your site and its functionality.
Always considers following things to choose a secure web host:
- SFTP – It stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol and provides an additional layer of protection to drag your files to where you want to upload them
- SSL – It stands for Secure Sockets Layer and provides an encrypted path between browser and web server
- Backups – Make sure that you web host perform backup regularly to protect your site from disaster or any problem
- Server Maintenance – Your web host should maintain the server adequately to ensure attacks are limited