The Hosting You Choose Affects Your Website

Your company website provides not only a virtual storefront or salesperson all day, every day, but it also sets the tone for your online presence. Sure, social media campaigns help spread your gospel and online ads promote your goods and services, but all those posts and clicks ideally link back to your website, where website hosting basics come into play.

Your website is the base of operations for your business on the internet. Optimizing your website means keeping it responsive, mobile-friendly, up-to-date and welcoming. The more accurately your site hits each of these targets, the more likely your company is to benefit from your online presence. The best websites actually make money for their companies by generating leads that turn into customers.

What Your Website Needs

Every website requires three things to operate efficiently:

1. Your unique content
2. A unique website domain name
3. A stable website host

Your content is how you connect to your visitors. It includes the words, the illustrations and the links that tie all your pages together. Without effective content, your website is nothing but an empty shell. You can either craft your content yourself or hire a team of writing professionals to write it.

Finding a domain name may be the easiest of the three steps, but it’s no less important. Imagine if Coca Cola had called its website carbonatedsugar.com instead of coca-cola.com. It would likely have been much less effective. A domain name can make the difference between memorable and forgettable.

Finally, for website hosting basics, a website host is the company that houses your website files and makes them available to everyone on the internet. You can spend thousands of dollars on designing and developing your website, but if you opt to go with the absolute least expensive host, you’re limiting how effective your website can be.

The Skinny on Website Hosting Basics

To get the best deal and the best results from your website hosting company, it helps to know what to look for. The features that matter most depend on your specific needs, but common things to inquire about include:

• Price, usually per month or per year. You may even get a discount by paying annually. Find out what’s included for that price. Some companies charge extra for each request!
• Platform-readiness. If you’re building a WordPress site, for example, make sure the host supports that platform without any hidden fees. That’s one of the big website hosting basics.
• Uptime support. How responsive will they be to your requests or to emergencies? You may not need 24/7 support, but then again, if your website is your business, any downtime can cost you money.
• Speed. Some hosts cram as many of their smaller clients as possible onto a single server. Your website stays up, but its load speed slows way down due to the load. A slow website doesn’t encourage visitors to remain on your site. No matter how well designed your site is, if it’s slow, it’s not going to be effective generating customers.
• Security. Does your host offer secure sockets layer (SSL) security? That puts the “s” after the “http” and adds a layer of security that Google for one now expects. Your host should also do more to protect your data, like protection against hackers.
• Backup and recovery. Find out how frequently they back up their systems, including your website. Ask if they can restore your whole website or even a single file from a previous version.
• Storage space. Some hosts limit the amount of space you can use on their servers. It may seem like a large amount when you’re starting out with a six-page website, but as you blog and add pages and images, you may need more and more space. Make sure you won’t have to pay extra.

All Website Hosting Is Not the Same

Website hosting basics include learning how each company differs. When you know what to ask, you not only get the best deal, you get the best service. It’s your business. Make sure you get:

• The fastest servers
• The most up-to-date software
• Lots of space on the server
• No competition or sharing for server processing
• Servers that don’t crash
• Backup servers to ensure your website is always online
• Protection from hackers
• Prompt response to queries

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.