Do Your Customers Care About What Hosting Package You Choose?
Your web hosting affects your website, which in turn affects your customers.
Choosing the right web hosting package for your business website is a big decision, and it’s one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. The way your website performs can greatly affect your business’s reputation, and in the online world your reputation is everything. It’s very difficult to build trust with your virtual customers as there’s very little real-life interaction between them and your company. Trust is the key to building a legion of loyal customers who will part with their own money for your products and services, and in turn go on to recommend your site to their friends.
For many small businesses and startups a shared web hosting solution is ample. Your site probably isn’t so large that it requires a lot of storage space on a server, and it’s not likely to be receiving much traffic. As your site grows and your business gains popularity, though, you should see your site stats soar, with traffic increasing as your customer base grows. A shared hosting platform is not designed to support sites that receive high traffic, and you could risk damaging your reputation and losing out on valuable revenue by skimping on your hosting.
Investing in your hosting solution is investing in your customers. Creating the strongest environment for your online business is vital in today’s digital age, as there is some stiff competition out there also vying for the eyeballs – and the cash – of your potential customers. If your business hopes to compete in this environment you have to be willing to part with enough funds to create the strongest web presence possible, capable of handling high periods of traffic, multiple simultaneous transactions and the weight of your glowing business reputation.
A virtual private server could be the flexible hosting option your business website needs. Unlike standard shared web hosting, virtual private servers give you allotted resources on a server that are exclusively yours. You’ll get more space, power and bandwidth with a virtual private server, and you won’t be at risk of having your site slowed down by noisy neighbours. A weakness of shared hosting is that as all the resources are shared between sites on the server, your site can be bogged down if another site experiences high traffic, which will affect how reliable customers perceive your website to be.
The resources on a virtual private server can be scaled up as your site grows (or down if you need less bandwidth), so if you need more space to store your website you’ll be able to upscale your storage allowance. Virtual private servers are also a cloud-based solution, meaning your data will be stored on a number of clustered machines. This means your site will be kept online even if one machine loses power or malfunctions, as another machine will simply begin serving your data to customers over the internet. Customers can’t access a site that’s down, and they are likely to take a dim view of any company which is experiencing website downtime on a regular basis. Keeping your site online around the clock will boost your business reputation, and your conversion rates.
Should a virtual private server later prove lacking in the adequate resources required to store and serve your site over the internet, a dedicated server hosting solution is the next step. Once your site has outgrown its virtual environment you can take complete control of an entire server, on which all resources are dedicated to you. With a dedicated server hosting solution your site will be the only data on that machine; all the storage, power and bandwidth are entirely yours to do with as you please. Although dedicated server hosting requires some technical knowledge and a bigger investment by your company – you may even need to hire a webmaster to take control of your server management – the freedom it will give your site to grow is well worth the investment.