How Your Web Hosting Package Could Damage Your Business
Investing in your online presence is vital for any business that hopes to gain the trust of its customers.
In the digital age, customers have great power over the businesses they buy from. They have more avenues than ever before to control the conversation around these businesses, thanks to the invention and widespread adoption of social media. Customers are now met with an onslaught of options when shopping online, meaning they are less likely to display any brand loyalty as they can simply head back to Google and search for an alternative to purchasing from you.
So how does web hosting fit into all this?
When building your online presence you must always keep your customers in mind. In fact, when creating your brand, choosing which marketing channels to use to engage with your customers and making any number of important business decisions, your customers should be at the center of the discussion. Everything your business does, after all, is to encourage customers to buy from you, recommend your site to a friend and remain loyal to your business.
The design and development of your website should consider the needs of your customers: navigation should be clear, purchase points should be easily located – along with the products themselves – and the purchasing journey must be as simple as possible. Even the color scheme of your website should please the customer, as certain designs will give your website visitors the impression that your business isn’t respectable.
Your web hosting package, even though it doesn’t come into direct contact with your website visitors, will affect how they view your business just as much as design, development and marketing issues. Web hosting underpins your website, storing your important data – and in some cases your customers’ – and serving it to your website visitors around the world. It’s thanks to web hosting that your site is online, as without it there would be no way of your potential customers locating your business on the internet.
What web hosting solution provides the best experience for online customers?
Depending on the size and purpose of your site, there are several hosting options available to you. Shared website hosting is usually the package that most startups will opt for as it is cheap and easy – you don’t need any technical knowledge to get your site on the web. While shared hosting has many benefits, it is not a long-term solution for any business hoping to trade over the internet; the resources on the machine will not be enough to support your site should it see any growth in size or popularity.
When your business begins to grow, and demand on your website grows in accordance, you must upgrade your web hosting package to cope with the change. A dedicated server hosting solution will provide you with a completely isolated, fully-owned server environment to store and manage your important data. In addition, with dedicated power, storage and bandwidth resources that are entirely yours to use at will you can build an online environment that will offers the security and the speed to meet the needs of even the most finicky customer.
If your site is slow or unavailable your customers will go elsewhere, and with shared hosting you run the risk of this happening. The shared environment means that if one site sees a rise in traffic or takes up too much space then your site can become slow and unresponsive, which will cause you to lose customers in the short term and decrease your conversion rate in the long term. An investment in your web hosting solution is an investment in your customers and in the success of your business. Take control of your web hosting today and harness the power of a dedicated server – your customers will thank you later!