Reasons to Prioritise Quality Web Hosting for Your Website

Your business website is your digital storefront, key marketing focus, and the first impression your potential customers will get about your business. Therefore, providing the best experience possible for them is crucial, especially with some competitors potentially reaching for the stars regarding an unforgettable user experience ahead of what you may currently offer.

Web hosting providers offer a space for your site to live and may offer additional security and other valuable services. For this reason, high-quality web hosting for your website should be top of your list. Website hosting is important to your business and could end up being a costly mistake if you don’t know what to look for.

Below, we explain why good website hosting is a must for improved conversions, ROI, and brand growth.

Technical Support

Not all web hosting services are created equal, and this is none more evident by the support a provider devotes to their customers. When you contact a hosting provider for technical support you don’t want to be immediately upsold on another product without the technical issue having been resolved. You didn’t call for sales advice.

However, in some rare instances, a customer may need to be upsold on their hosting solution or associated services. If the current hosting isn’t powerful enough, or needs more resources allocated to solve an issue, then this should be explained to the customer as to the why first.

Support is essential when your business exists online. Even if you feel at ease in the technical realm, events can happen, and some of those may throw you for a loop. You may not have the time to tend to unexpected issues that may arise. Therefore, if anything occurs with the server and affects your website, your web host should remedy the problem for you efficiently and effectively.

Enhanced Security

Like in real life, and the recent increase of cybercrime, your website and the internet requires a higher level of security than it did on a few years ago. Robust security ensures that your site is protected against hackers or malware or at the very least makes your website more difficult to breach. In some cases, even if your website has been compromised, the hacker may not be able to gain entry to more sensitive areas of your website if you have additional security measures in place. These could include two-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) for administrator accounts or non-default login procedures.

Have you ever clicked a page to be told that the connection is not secure? This message means that sensitive information, such as credit card details or login credentials, could be at risk. This lack of security is a big no-no when creating a professional business website. You likely to lose countless customers that will never return.

Therefore, it is essential that a SSL/TLS certificate (HTTPS) is present and activated on your website, this will ensure all information running through your site and visitor browsers are automatically encrypted.

Conversely, if your website hosting company does not offer a free SSL/TLS certificate (e.g. AutoSSL), then it is suggested that you look elsewhere for another website hosting company. One that prioritises the security of your website and your visitors.

Regular Backups

A dependable web host backs up your data regularly. Backups ensure that if you mistakenly delete a file, you can effectively recover it, resolve update problems, and provides an additional level of protection. Think of it like hitting the save button after working on a time-intensive project. Doing this ensures that your website is easier and quicker to restore with all critical backups complete.

This service may be restricted depending on things like the hosting framework and/or storage space available on your hosting plan. Responsible website hosting companies will offer a regular backup solution in most cases.

If you’re unsure of your backup options, ask your web host or contact us and we can check what existing options you may already have.

We strongly recommend planning for off-site redundancy backups as well for your website files. Emails, either IMAP or POP3 can be recovered in most cases, but website files and databases can be more susceptible to damage or data lose. Thus, an additional backup kept on another server/storage medium will provide an additional option in keeping your website data safe.

Loading Speed and Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB)

Load speed is increasingly important as brands worldwide prioritise ensuring that their websites open with speed and accuracy across all devices. If your website takes too long, you risk your potential clients leaving you for a competitor, which is another big no-no!

A good web host will ensure that your page opens within 1-3 seconds, an ideal loading time for most websites. There are exceptions to this “rule” however. If your website is script heavy, and contains a lot of additional functionality (ecommerce and online stores) and marketing analytics tracking (Google Analytics), each of these can slow a website loading time.

That is the trade-off. What do you value most in your website; website loading speed or are you prepared to sacrifice a little speed for the ability to track visitor metric data for marketing purposes?