The benefits of website hosting for a business
Having reliable website hosting is beneficial to a business when it performs well. When it doesn’t serve a business reliably, then it can hurt it more than it helps. A website can also be used to connect with potential customers before they decide to buy a product or service from a company.
There’s a certain amount of selling that can go on before a visitor makes the decision to establish a business relationship with the company, even if that decision only means a small initial sale. More can follow later. Good website hosting can ensure your business has a reliable site making sure you do not lose the sale before it even happens!
To be sure that you find good website hosting there are plenty of review sites out there, including the Easy Hosting Guide, so you can ensure that your business website starts on the right foot.
Superior technical staff
Having technically savvy employees at a web hosting company is critical. Web servers, network cables, routers and other equipment will inevitably go wrong at some point. Being able to quickly diagnose the true cause of a technical problem and knowing how to address it and take action quickly to get websites back online is important for UK businesses.
As quoted by a leading business insurance company, Pembroke Insurances: “Having our website hosted by a premium provider ensures that our website converts better!”
When choosing website hosting that’s too low cost, it forces the web hosting company to hire lower-cost, less qualified or experienced staff to stay on the right side of the profit and loss statement. Unfortunately, this leads to offshore support that’s difficult to understand at times and people who lack the experience to figure out technical problems, if at all. In a worst-case scenario, it leaves a business hanging indefinitely which is a disaster for their customers.
Dependable uptime for the website
Every website hosting business offers an uptime guarantee. In reality, when major web hosting companies have had problems staying online due to a denial of service attack, their downtime lasted quite a few hours before the problem got resolved. Spread over a year, a few hours don’t add up to a single percentage point of downtime, but for businesses having a sale or hitting their peak season period, the half-day or full-day of downtime can be catastrophic.
And while certain software, such as a dependable firewall or a virtual private network, can help mitigate downtime caused by a denial of service attack, your choice of web host will determine the amount of downtime your website will experience.
What you want to discover with a web host is whether they’ve suffered a prolonged amount of downtime before. If they have, how long did it last? Do they know the cause, and what have they done to prevent it from happening a second or third time? That’s really where the rubber meets the road, rather than downtime guarantees, as these guarantees don’t cover loss of business sales while offline.
Make additional profits from a web presence
A website shouldn’t just be a “brochure-ware” site. It should provide a way for customers to directly make purchases and complete the transaction. You can have various social media accounts that seek to widen the brand’s appeal, but people interested should be funnelled through to the website.
It’s the hub and spoke model in action. The website is the hub and the spokes are all the other places where the brand is represented, from the YouTube channel to the Pinterest boards to the Instagram photos and videos. It should all link back to the site, to grab that customer’s attention and get the sale. Make the cost of the web presence pay for itself 1,000+ times over.
Connect with clients through a blog
Don’t forget to publish a blog on your company website. This is a way to share the opinions of staff about the services provided, the importance of customers, and so on. Having a blog goes way beyond the meaning behind a logo or brand image. It connects the mind-space of employees with the customers. Posting on Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram is useful too.
Websites are the lifeblood of the online life for every company now. It’s important to remember that businesses do not own their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts. They can be removed or deleted by the site’s overseers with little warning or redress. This is another reason to use the hub and spoke model as it claims the business’s independence by pulling customers onto their site and not just the third-party’s site.