Yes, it does. It can affect user experience, SEO and security.
As we explained in our last article, website hosting is transferring your website file to a hosting server. You have a choice of different types of hosting environments; shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud were the ones we discussed last time. If you missed that article click here to better understand what these environments are.
Now that you understand why you need a hosting company and what types of hosting are available, lets talk about how the wrong hosting environment can have a negative impact on your website’s performance and online presence.
Building your site on the wrong host is like building your house on unstable soil, things look fine initially, but eventually the cracks start appearing.
In website terms, these cracks can range from intermittent technical glitches to the inability to implement new content or capabilities on your site.
Not every website host in the market is created equal.
Site load speed – This could impact your SEO if it doesn’t allow your pages to load fast enough. This usually happens if you are on a shared hosting plan that doesn’t manage their server loads properly or at all. You won’t get optimal load time—and a slow load time is bad for your SEO and user experience.
How quickly your site loads has a major impact, both on a visitor’s perception and on the rank Google gives your site in the search results.
Secure host provider – Who you host with can have security problems. And because site security is a ranking factor for Google’s search algorithm, unsecure web hosting could be bad for your website’s SEO.
There’s a lot you can do to block the hackers, but a good host can make securing your site so much easier. At Pro Web Marketing we fully isolate accounts from each other so that malware cannot spread to other websites on the server. We have 24/7 monitoring to stop an attack before it happens and we regularly run malware scans on all of our server.
All it takes is one break-in to make you wish you would have got the heck out of Dodge.
Downtime and reliability – Your website hosting needs to offer enough bandwidth for both page load speed and server uptime.
If you run a small business, you might be tempted to get the cheapest hosting option, which is typically a shared hosting plan at one of the larger companies. But if you have a responsive site or one with a lot of images (like a project gallery), you are going to need more bandwidth and this option is going to yield poor results.
The big shared hosting providers load up one server and start filling up another. They don’t put the good sites on an upscale server and the riffraff on another. They load up one server and start filling up another without a thought about how the other websites on that server may adversely affect yours.
Scalability – When your traffic volume increases over time, you need to upgrade your hosting subscription to meet these growing needs. And you want to be able to stay with the same provider – after all, there is nothing worse than having to switch hosting providers once your site is already well established.
Email hosting – If you’re starting a website for business purposes, you’ll most likely want a matching business email. If this is the case, make sure to check that your hosting provider offers email hosting.
Regular backups – One of the main benefits of choosing the best web host is regular backups. Whether someone hacks your website or your database goes down, your web host should be able to restore it in a matter of seconds. Whichever host you go for, make sure that it performs regular backups of your website.
Customer Support – Having a responsive tech support team is critical, too many companies have support staff that either dodge the question or bounce their customers around.
Reputation – Seeking out independent reviews, as well as customer reviews, can offer valuable insight into the practicalities and day-to-day experiences of real customers. Does the host display testimonials on their site? A simple Google search can offer up page after page of bad reviews for certain companies. Generally, independently-owned companies are better than large corporations
Remember your website is the online face for our business, it is vital that you put it on solid hosting.
The Pro Web Difference – What differentiates us from other hosting companies is that our servers are “thoughtfully managed”. What we mean by that is before placing a website on one of our servers we are thoughtful of the needs of that website and the other websites on that server. We keep the total number of websites on a server low so that we can allocate the resources based on each website’s needs. We also have security measures in place to help prevent a site from being hacked, in the unlikely event that should happen (it is the internet after all), there are additional protections to prevent access to every other website on that server. We have monitoring software that will notify us 24/7 should there be an issue on any of our servers so that we can respond quickly with minimum interruption or risk. Our managed hosting infrastructure is tailored for security and site speed, we manage all aspects of your hosting leaving you the time to devote to growing your business.
Call us at 877-577-6932 to discuss your hosting needs.
