6 Crucial Things to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Service Here's how to avoid making the wrong choice when it comes to web hosting services.
By Godwin Oluponmile Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As an entrepreneur, you planned to build a profitable income machine online, but this income-building sits on a time bomb if it is built with a quaky web hosting company. Making the wrong choice when it comes to a web hosting service can cripple the user experience. An ugly website experience easily frustrates buyers. Especially when they have other options, they'll choose to abandon your brand's unique offer. For instance, you lose 7% conversion for every one-second delay in web load speed. Revenue keeps going down. Google exposed how 53% of users abandon every website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Many famous and respected web hosting services that can impede a brand's goals and aspirations are still around. Website owners don't pay enough attention to the impact popular hosting services have on websites before patronizing these services. Load speed alone? The impact web hosting has on a website goes beyond how smooth and fast a site loads. In this article, you'll find out various consequences and effects the web hosting you choose can have on your website's performance. Here they are below:
Related: Find a Web Hosting Plan That Works for Your Business's Budget
1. Website downtime
When end-users can't access a website, the website is down. "Downtime" is the complete outage of a website. Most web hosting services that offer outdated servers, old information technology infrastructure and non-virtualized servers have ugly downtime issues.
Hosting providers need to give more details regarding how their uptime percentages are determined. For instance, if a hosting company promises its uptime gives 99% performance daily, your website shouldn't suffer beyond the 1% guarantee.
The bad news is that when a website is down for too long, it pounces on the site's SEO performance. For instance, Google, as a search engine, begins to record unreliable signals from your website. Google may de-rank a website from search results if downtime lasts for days instead of minutes.
2. Load speed
Millions of websites offer a similar service or sell the same products. Your visitors will not waste their time on a website that takes too long to load.
According to a report by Backlinko, the average web load speed is 10.4 seconds on a desktop and 27.4 seconds on a mobile. Any website load speed exceeding this time is vulnerable to high bounce and low conversion rates. Besides, Google prefers websites with a good load speed, and having a bad load speed can affect a brand's search engine optimization and general search ranking. Your web hosting speed can be affected by any of these factors:
The hard drive provided by your web hosting company
Solid States Drives (SSDs) or Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)
Random Access Memory: The RAM is the space your web host provides to keep your website's files.
Bandwidth: The bandwidth is the amount of data your web host can send.
When choosing a web host, you need to consider the above factors to prevent low website load speed, which results in a high bounce rate.
Related: 7 Simple Ways to Make Your Website Faster and More Responsive
3. Scalability
Your website's scalability is the ability your website has to cope with the increase in activities or resources on your site. A scalable website can manage a high traffic volume and content without sacrificing efficiency, timeliness or cost. A website needs the ability to grow and modify itself as necessary to be genuinely scalable.
Depending on the level of the hosting plan you choose, your website needs to handle scalability situations such as:
A sudden spike in traffic/visitors
An expansion in service/product range
Change in code structures
You tend to save resources when these factors are considered early enough while they build the website. The web hosting provider should be able to handle the spike in traffic without affecting the website's performance if you choose the right hosting package.
4. Security
A report by SiteLock shows how websites experience an average of 94 attacks daily and are visited by bots approximately 2,608 times a week. Your web hosting service impacts the security of your website. An affordable web hosting plan may need strong security measures to guard against hackers and cybercriminals accessing your website and potentially essential website data.
A good web hosting provider should have in-built security features, including a free Secure Sockets Layer certificate, Secure Shell Access and more. These features prevent a website from experiencing phishing attacks or malware.
5. Customer support
How responsive and helpful your customer support services are will influence your website. Past customers' feedback will show you how responsive and helpful a particular web hosting service is. Web hosting providers must be able to identify issues affecting a website's functionalities. A web hosting provider should provide 24/7 customer support with professionals to fix queries immediately.
6. Database connection failures
When your website displays "Internal Server Error" or "Database Connection Failed," your server is full of traffic (accessed by too many end-users simultaneously). It would be best to consider a hosting plan that can handle a sporadic traffic increase without affecting your website's performance on whichever hosting plan you choose. Beware of hosting plans with bad customer feedback on this factor.
Related: 5 Reasons Why Your Website Is Holding You Back and How to Fix It
Considering these six factors above, it's evident that your web hosting affects your website's performance. Be sure to do your research, consider your needs and choose a hosting provider that provides both short-term and long-term satisfaction.
