For any business to survive in the very competitive business terrain today, a visible and strong online presence is essential. Individuals, organisations and businesses that have online websites where they offer their products and services noticed a significant increase in their profit margins. If you are considering taking your business online, then you are on the right track.
Before you get started, there are some basic things that you would need to help your business stand out. Although the list is long, a good web hosting service is a very essential component of a strong online presence. The web hosting company you go with will have a huge influence on the success of your website.
If your target audience is in New Zealand, you would benefit from hiring the services of a local New Zealand web hosting service provider; this will give you a competitive advantage over other players in your industry.
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Why Is Web Hosting Important?
In this day and age, any business organisation that wants to be successful needs to have a strong online presence, a good web hosting service is an essential part of this. It would be almost impossible to have a profitable or successful online presence if your website loads slowly and suffers from frequent downtime.
Here are some other reasons why investing in a good web hosting service is important for your website and business:
Improved SEO And Search Engine Ranking
If your website experiences a lot of downtimes when search engines are trying to analyse it, it will negatively affect your ranking. In addition, a slow loading site can also have a negative impact on your ranking in search engine results. This is why it is important for you to invest in a reputable professional web hosting platform in order to protect your SEO rankings.
Increased Website Load Time
A fast loading website offers a better user experience for your site visitors – which is an influencing factor for how they feel about your business and your site. A sluggish website will experience an increase in bounce rates, as it would put off your site’s visitors.
This is why a good web hosting platform is essential so that you can keep your traffic. Remember the more responsive your site is, the longer your site’s will stay and convert into customers
Better Customer Support
One of the major challenges you would face if you go with a poor web hosting provider is an inadequate support system in the event of downtimes or site crashes. This is not ideal because you could lose your website’s data, traffic and information if you cannot quickly fix issues when they occur.
Website disruptions or downtime can be very bad for conversion, stats and search engine ranking, so it is best avoided. A good web hosting provider will be able to provide technical support, tools and backups for your data in the event of disruption or downtime.
Reduced Probability Of Website Downtime
It is common knowledge that going with a poor web host would mean that your websites would be more likely to suffer disruptions or suddenly become unavailable, because a poor web hosting service provider will not protect your website when it goes down, leaving you open to serious losses in your customers trust as well as business revenue. To avoid this, go with a good web hosting provider.
Frequent Website Backups
A reputable professional web hosting platform will protect your website and backup your data. What this means is, you can readily restore your information in the event of an attack or downtime and quickly get your site back to normal.
Better Security (HTTP)
A good web hosting provider will offer a secure IP address that comes enabled with HTTP for your website. So, sensitive information on your website would be protected by encryption.
With this extra layer of protection, all the data that passes through your site is automatically encrypted and hidden from the public. This way, hackers won’t be able to access personal or sensitive information shared on your website.
How Much Does Web Hosting Cost?
The price for web hosting varies, it depends entirely on the individual web hosting company. Even though there are affordable web hosting services out there, please be reminded that “cheap” isn’t always best.
We recommended that you clearly outline the exact requirements you would need for your websites: for example would you need a PHP or MySQL hosting? How much traffic do you expect your website to receive? How large is your website database?
The answers to these questions will help you ascertain if a shared hosting package would be the best web hosting service for your website and domain or if you would need dedicated server hosting.
Four Tips For Choosing An Excellent Web Hosting Provider
Go For A Provider That Is Flexible
Websites are very unique and like your business will grow over time. This is why you should look for a flexible hosting provider, who would offer custom solutions and implement changes to suit your website as it grows. For instance, if your website traffic doubles, would it be possible for you to get expanded bandwidth or storage space?
If you decide to open an online store, will your provider allow you to add an SSL certificate to your website for improved SEO and extra security? So, go for a web hosting service provider that has a good reputation for offering the aforementioned services.
Do Not Fixate On Price
When choosing a web hosting provider for a new website or migrating to another provider, a lot of individuals tend to focus on price. This isn’t the way to go. Even though it is a natural concern, it shouldn’t be a deciding one – especially if you are setting up an e-commerce website for your organisation or business.
Tech support, software, quality hardware and security are factors to consider first.
Consider Technical Specifications
If you intend to host a website with loads of contents like an online shop or a blog, you would need the relevant resources to support and maintain your website. Resources in this context are memory, speed, power, space, website builder and other technical pieces and bits that make the running of your websites smooth. So, before going for a web hosting provider, ask for the following information:
- Storage size
- RAM size
- Core type
- Bandwidth size
The Quality Of Support
This is often overlooked when researching a web hosting provider but it is one of the most important factors to consider when buying web hosting. You absolutely cannot afford to have your websites become unavailable. However, if it happens, would you have access to a real person? If you need help making a quick change, would you have access to ready support?
Customer support reputation and systems should be thoroughly researched before you hire a web hosting firm.
