Not sure why, but not many online marketers talk about the need of using a quality web host when doing online marketing. I will talk about why it is very important to use a reliable and high quality web host if you want to be run a successful online business and online marketing campaign.
Online marketing is all about contents and conversions right? Any web host is fine as long as it has good uptime? Well, uptime is one of the most important factor, but there are other factors that can affect your online marketing effort as well. Below is a list of things you should consider when searching for a web host if you take your online business and marketing seriously:
- Let’s start with uptime and discuss why reliable web hosting is so important. If your web site is not hosted with a reliable web host and it goes down a lot, you lose a lot more than just the cost of your web hosting. Let me ask you this, how much do you value your time? If you are an SEO expert, you can probably do SEO for a website and see good results with your effect in 3 months. Ok, great, Now you are getting the traffic, but because you were cheap in the beginning and chose a cheap web host now with these extra traffic, your website goes down constantly. Your visitors are not happy and Google is not happy and your SEO ranking goes down.
- Google didn’t create the Page Speed tool for nothing. The page speed of your website is a SEO ranking factor so your web hosting not only need good uptime, but it needs to be fast as well. If you and your competitor has the exact same SEO and their site is twice as fast as yours, in most cases your site will rank lower.
- Google cares about content as well as user experience. Yes, so many internet marketers put so much emphasis on link building and contents, they forget about user experience. To be honest, I think they leave this out because they are not web developers and don’t want their clients to know this is an important factor of online marketing. Yes, if your website is fast and all the pages loads quickly, your visitors are more likely to stay on your website longer hence lead to more sales.
- Higher conversion rate. This is very similar to point 3. A better user experience will lead to higher conversion rate. Your website needs to be fast not just on the product page, but the checkout process as well. Most of the time normal pages and product pages can be easily cached, but once a customer starts the checkout process, these pages are very dynamic in nature and less caching are used. If your web hosting server is slow, this is when it will show when this is when you should produce the best shopping experience for your customers.
- Better customer support and communication. This is something not many people talk about. Cheaper hosts tends to be penalised more because more spammers use their servers. Yes, this is true. Cheaper servers attract more spammers. Your customers is not going to know they have missed your email because their spam filter have marked your email as spam. They will just assume you have bad customer service. Better hosting providers usually put more resources into preventing spam from their servers. If you want to grow your brand, you will want to create the best customer support experience for your customers.
- Better disaster management. Yes, this is very important and one of the most overlooked area for online businesses. After spending a lot of time and money on your online business, your website gets hacked (This happens a lot more often than you think) and you do not have the IT knowledge to fix this problem. You go to your host and instead of helping, they suspend your account because you are using a hacked software. They won’t re-enable your site until this is fixed. You are losing money because your website is down. Your host restore your site from a backup and within 24 hours it is exploited again.
This actually happens a lot and the reason why you should find a host which does not only have good uptime and fast servers. If you do not have your own development team, your host should be able to provide you support in case of your website is exploited. Your host should also be able to provide you a more comprehensive backup and restore plan if you website has high turn over. - DDos protection and other intrusion detection. Your host should be able to give you advise on DDos protections and other type of intrusion. This is important because we’re at an age where when you still to become successful, your competitors will sometime use these black-hat strategy trying to bring down your website and eliminate you from their market.
- Cloud solutions. Can you web host help you with cloud integration. When I say cloud, I don’t mean a web host putting a few servers together for the purpose of high availability. High availability is good, and important, but that is not a real cloud. A real cloud solution is something like Amazon CloudFront and EC2 and Google Cloud Platform. If you sell globally and you want your website to run really fast for customers of all countries, then you will need to consider migrating to the cloud. A good host should be able to help you with a strategy to migrate your website to the cloud and at the same time save you some money. Moving to the cloud also make your website more scalable. If you are going to spend money on a TV ad, you should consider moving to the cloud first and only pay for the resources when your website needs it.
As you can see, there are many considerations when searching for a web host for your online business. ANS Communications has been a web host of choice for many Australian businesses and we are able to cater for all aspects of your hosting needs. Talk to us today and see why we stand out from the rest. 😉