When you’re thinking about maximizing overall profits through your website, hosting services may not be the first thing that you think of in general. However, it’s hard to overstate just how important these hosting sites are. There are a hundred little things that are often fairly invisible that the best hosting sites can do in order to boost your website and help you better compete in your niche. Here are a few examples of surprisingly critical things that the right hosting service can do to keep your website from failing and propel it into maximum competitiveness.
Security Certificates
Hosting services that regularly update their security certificates for you are worth their weight in gold. One of the reasons why this matters so much would include how Google has changed its policy for SSL certificate requirements.
In July 2008, Google changed its policy so that it listed any site without HTPPS would be labeled as “not secure.” So, if a site only had HTTP, anyone navigating to that site would see that big scary warning on their browser. As you might imagine, this often has a rather negative effect on the stats for any site that chooses not to switch to the more secure system.
So, this is one of the ways that an excellent hosting site can help, since they can ensure that you have the security certificates you need and stay with HTTPS so as to not annoy Google or alarm and irritate potential visitors to the site.
Broken Link Checks
For whatever reason, sometimes your site may end up with broken links. Perhaps this was an accident on your part, a typo when you were updating the site, or else perhaps the site you linked to went through some change that you weren’t privy to knowing about. Regardless of the reason why the link got broken, it’s important you fix them as soon as possible Nothing annoys users quite like clicking on a link that doesn’t work and gives them an error message.
It makes that user feel like your site is broken. They may never come back again. It’s a completely wasted opportunity. With the right host, you can find it much easier to check for broken links or web pages that are running slow so you can fix them rapidly. Internet users aren’t exactly forgiving when it comes to slow web pages either.
Performance
Related to finding broken links is how well your site performs. In other words, a good hosting site will make it so that web pages will load quickly, even if there’s a lot of media on them. Quick loading web pages are critical to try to appeal to those who come to the site. If the page runs too slow, then all of your other work will be lost because the user may become frustrated and decide just to ignore your page instead.
This isn’t always something you think of when considering when thinking about marketing strategies, but it is critical. For example, when it comes to mobile sites, those that load in 5 seconds make twice the mobile ad revenue than those that run on a slower hosting site that spits out the site in 19 seconds.
This is a huge difference for just an extra ten to fifteen seconds of run time. It really illustrates just how critical performance really is.
Automatic Updates
Updating your site when something out of your control changes can be one of the most irritating things that you have to do as a site owner. However, any hosting site worth its salt can do this sort of thing for you completely automatically, making it much easier for you to operate, and also making it more certain that errors won’t pop up without your knowledge.
Uptime
Uptime is the holy grail for hosting sites, and it should be for you as well. Every second that your site is down is a second that you can’t reach your customers and one where they can’t buy your products or services. The best hosting sites should be able to provide you with impressive uptime and with impressive options for being alerted and handling the situation when the occasional outage is inevitable.
Technical Support
Chances are good that you aren’t as trained in everything related to hosting and website connectivity as the best technical support staff on a high-quality hosting site are. This means that if you have some serious problem with your site, such as getting hit with a DDoS attack or some other hacking aggression, then you’ll be able to handle it much more effectively with the help of support staff on whoever does your hosting.
This is of critical importance because these kinds of attacks can easily take your site down for days or longer, even indefinitely if you let them. Plus, the more successful you are with your site, the more it’s going to gain visibility on the Internet. The more that it has visibility, the more it’s going to be a target for those looking for money or just to make a name for themselves. If your site is constantly down, then you can’t get your business done. You might also lose some reputation that way if it becomes known your site was the victim of an attack.
In many cases, E-commerce companies live and die by their reputations online, so it’s critically important that you do what you can to protect yours.
Other Security Considerations
A hosting site of a high caliber can also help in many other situations beyond just providing technical support or giving you security certificates. For example, if a hosting site can vouch for the physical data center, that’s often a big advantage as well. After all, one of the possible ways to attack a site is to try and physically access where their data is stored in brick and mortar space, at a data center. So, if a hosting company can vouch for the data being protected there physically, with guards and other provisions, this is another crucial service for website owners.
This kind of physical breach would highly alarm any website owner’s customers, so it’s hard to overstate its importance.
Beyond that, there should be several other security measures, including a firewall to protect the actual servers. There should also be provisions on top of that where you can add extra screening through the hosting and on your own site with spam filtering software, permission provisions, and even security plugins that can all enhance security greatly.
Backups
Another way that a quality hosting site can help you is by having website backups made of your site on a constant basis. This means that if your site suffers some kind of attack that damages it, you can just go straight to one of the frequent backups in order to not miss a beat in your business day. This way, you don’t have to start all over again with building your site since, after all, you likely took a lot of care in learning from past experiences on the site and improving it bit by bit over time. It would be a shame if all that was lost in one shot.
That’s why it’s worth checking to see what kind of backups a site offers. There are many different things that can go wrong on a site, and it’s surprisingly easy for files, configurations extensions or anything else to suddenly be lost forever due to one mistake or unfortunate situation.
Domain Email Address
Building a brand from your site can be a tricky business, but one thing that can make it easier is if you have a brand email address. Many of the best hosting sites will allow you to do this. If your customers or clients see your website name and brand at the end of every email that you send out, your brand will seep into their mind more easily.
It’s often important to create a distinction between your personal email address and that of your company for several reasons. For one thing, it’s easier to keep your personal and business lives separate this way. For another, this kind of professionalism is going to be crucial in getting people to take your brand seriously. Conducting all official business through these types of emails will make it easier for you and any employees working for you to gain traction in your marketing efforts. Again, it’s hard to overstate how important having this kind of advantage can be. You’re marketing is only going to be as effective as it can be if others view you as a professional and from one company and brand.
For more information about the importance of hosting on your website or any website that you are marketing for, please make sure you don’t delay in contacting us today. The sooner you contact us, the sooner we’ll be able to help set you up with the best hosting around, eliminating many of your problems big and small, and helping to boost your business.
