A Guide to How Web Hosting Can Affect Your Business In 2019 |
Posted: May 16, 2019 |
From time to time every business owner will make mistakes, but the problems associated with choosing the wrong web hosting company can be significant. There are so many options you can choose from for your web host, and your web hosting package today in 2019. Having so many options can make it hard to decide, and you can end up with a bit of paralysis by analysis. There is no doubt, though, that if you choose the wrong web hosting, the performance of your website can suffer and you can end up damaging your online and offline reputation. User experience is key to the online environment, and downtime, security issues, and other problems can come as a result of your hosting choices. Having the wrong server, in the wrong location, without the power that you need, can even affect your search engine rankings and the number of visitors Google sends to your website. In light of this, it's clear that your web hosting choices should not be taken lightly. We will address how to choose a web hosting provider and how web packages differ in a later article. This article will focus on the problems that can occur when you make the wrong choice of hosting provider. If you recognise what's going on here and associate it with your website, it may be time to rethink your hosting choices. What Happens When Your Web Hosting Goes Wrong?Many businesses don't really understand the link between hosting, SEO, and website performance. Nowadays, user experience is key to ranking your website in the search engines. Google is all about usability and will not rank sites with slow load speeds unless there is a really good reason to do so. In addition, site visitors are less patient than ever before, expecting immediately loading webpages and not suffering long load times for very long. People will click the back button rather than wait for five seconds and you'll end up losing business to the competition. In addition, your bounce rate will increase, providing yet another signal to Google that your website is not worthy of a decent ranking. If you've opted for a shared hosting provider then the performance of your website is likely to change over time and be affected by spikes in traffic of others on the same server resources. The search engines will not take your website seriously and not rank your website well. If you have database connection errors, downtime, or slow load speeds, this will be equated to mean poor user experience, and we all know what that means in the search engines. The worst consequences of poor web hosting are that Google and other search engines may just decide not to come back to your website or deindex your website. If you are on poor quality web hosting and there are security issues as a result of the activities of other patrons, you'll end up associated with a bad neighbourhood. Choosing a Good Hosting Provider We said we weren’t going into how to choose a web hosting provider, but here are three quick tips just to add some context.
Your Website SpeedAs we've seen above, your website speed is crucial to the performance of your website in search engines. Load times have become a key factor in the search algorithm as usability and website performance have become integral to user experience. There are lots of other ways you can improve your site speed, including using plug-ins for WordPress, caching images, compressing CSS and JavaScript and so on, but it will all be in vain if your website host is not able to provide the speedy performance you need. Downtime No web host can guarantee 100% uptime, but most top web hosts will guarantee 99.999% uptime. This means under six minutes of downtime every year, which is pretty good. You can use a system likeUptime Robot to monitor your downtime, but the first step is to ensure that you go with a web hosting provider that guarantees uptime at a high level. A study that was completed by CloudEndure found that of the top hundred thousand websites, 52% of them had an uptime of 99.9%. You need to be aiming for your hosting to be meeting that level at least. The Security of Your WebsiteYour business and website will obviously be affected if you are hacked by cybercriminals. You need a web host that takes security seriously, provides the ability to back up your website on a regular basis and has malware scanners that will detect intruders and let you know when they are trying to inject malicious code into your website. Your website host should also have a robust policy to ward off distributed denial of service attacks. We've seen in 2018 and already in 2019 that DDOS attacks are not always easy to ward off, but there should be emergency policies in place to get your website back up quickly if there is an attack. You need your data to be safe and to protect your reputation by minimizing downtime if an attack occurs. If there is unethical behaviour happening on a shared server, then you need web hosts to act. In order to really control as much as you can about your web hosting, you should probably avoid shared hosting altogether. The SEO FactorIt was April 2010 that Google started factoring in page speed as a crucial ranking factor. Since that time, it appears that Google has been stepping up how important paid speed is, especially since they moved over to a mobile-first index. The faster your website is, the better it is likely to perform in the search engines with everything else being equal. The speed of your website is down to the resources you have chosen, but also the speed and bandwidth of the Internet that your hosting provider is using. If your hosting provider doesn't have a sufficient infrastructure in place to cater for its clients, then you will suffer. In addition, it's often a good choice to choose a host in your geographical region. When you do a ping online of websites on the other side of the world, it comes back more slowly, and page load speeds are faster when the server resources are in your region. So, for example, if you are in the UK, you want a web host like Heart Internet, and if you're in New Zealand, you will probably want a host like Openhost.co.nz/web-hosting or another company based in that part of the world. The location of your physical servers really is an important aspect. In addition, your server IP will be related to the geographical region and so you are dictating to Google where you want to be found by choosing your hosting in a certain location. If you’re a business operating in New Zealand, you don't want all your visitors to be in the United Kingdom and vice versa. Troubleshooting When You Chose the Wrong Web HostingIf you know what you’re doing, then changing your web host is a relatively easy process. If you've noticed that your web performance isn't where it should be, then you should probably look for a new host. Go through a due diligence process before you move, and make sure that you understand the website migration process. Your website and applications will be hosted on a physical server or multiple physical servers. You will need to move those files to the new host, along with any databases in order for your website to go live again. To reduce downtime. You need to move the files before you move host so that when the domain name is pointed to the new hosting service, there is minimal downtime. It is sometimes hard to avoid downtime altogether, but you can keep it to just a few hours in most cases. If you have any doubts about the migration process, then make sure you engage the services of a professional who can go through a thorough checklist to ensure that no stone is left unturned in the backup and upload process. Conclusion While the characteristics of your website are important to the user experience, your web hosting provides a foundation and can be a limiting factor. You need a web host that will scale with your business and provide you with the resources that are required to maximize the potential of the code that you are displaying in the web browsers. If you need any help and guidance choosing a web hosting provider, or need help with the migration process, then read our other blogs or get in touch and we can discuss your options.
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