5 reasons why having good website hosting might be more important than you think

Website hosting is one of those things many people take for granted – the website is live, the emails are working, so all is good. The truth is though, you may not realise the difference getting good quality website hosting can have on your business or the potential problems you may have exposed your business to. Here is a list of my top 5 main reasons why you may need to rethink your website hosting

  1. If something goes wrong, you might be left high-and-dry. Hard drives die, websites get hacked, and software conflicts arise, etc. but does your host provide immediate telephone technical support? Chances are not. Cheap hosting is cheap because corners are cut, and one of the first places to cut costs is on the support side of things. How many enquiries will you miss if your website is down for a few days? How will your business’ reputation fare? There are few things more frustrating than finding the only way to get through to technical support is on a ticket system and not getting a reply for 2 or more working days. Making sure you have good quality technical support is a must.
  2. Google uses information about your web host within its algorithm to determine where you should appear in the search results. Yep, Google is very clever these days. Gone are the days of being able to manipulate the search results to get your site to the top of the first page. The only way to do it these days is using best practice in all areas of your site. Chances are, your site will be hosted outside of the UK which is not good news from a ranking point of view. Making sure your site is hosted in an appropriate geographical location will improve search engine ranking
  3. How quickly your website displays is very important to both Google and your site visitors. Cheap hosting will generally be on an overloaded and under-spec server in a foreign country. All of these things are bad individually but when you get them together, it can massively affect how your site displays causing ranking problems and annoying your site visitors. Good quality web hosting will improve usability and therefore website conversation rates
  4. You have a legal obligation under the data protection act to take appropriate steps to keep certain data stored securely and this includes on your website. You’re probably currently just hoping your web host is taking care of this but what happens if they’re not doing it properly? In fact, where is the data geographically? I’d recommend auditing what sensitive information you have stored online and make sure you can demonstrate you’ve taken the steps to keep it secure.
  5. When you’re on a shared server, you’re site is sitting alongside probably hundreds if other sites – and you have no idea what those sites are or what content they contain. Your IP address will be shared too meaning there is a whole host of potential problems here. We’ve seen peoples sites added to blacklists via IP through no fault of their own and we’ve seen whole servers compromised due to the actions of another site owner on the same shared host. One day you could be doing well, right up there on page one. The next day, you’re gone from the rankings altogether and suddenly the phone stops ringing. Avoid cheap hosting to avoid the shared server potential pitfalls

Not happy with your current website hosting? Did you know we do a free website migration service? This means we’ll move your site, database and email services to a good quality and appropriate server all for free

Our fully managed web hosting also includes all email services (IMAP, POP3, SMTP, webmail, etc.), spam protection, virus protection, technical support, and rolling 6 hour / 7 day backups.

Call us now on 0114 383 0711 for more information