Web hosting is often overlooked by many web developers and designers but it is critical if you care about website performance, security, reliability and SEO.
A fundamental part of your tech stack, web hosting has a big impact on not only how your website behaves but also how it’s seen by your users, customers or clients. Besides performance, security and reliability, web hosting directly impacts the overall user experience. Here are some key factors as to why good web hosting matters.
Website Speed & Performance
Good web hosting will provide faster response times, better technology, optimised servers and advanced features that will ensure your website is fast and responsive.
Why this matters: A website that loads quickly will reduce bounce rates and improve the user experience, which will lead to better engagement and conversions. Google has also confirmed that page speed is a key metric when it comes to page ranking.
Reliability & Higher Uptime
Good web hosting will also offer high uptime guarantees, this essentially means that your website will be available almost 100% of the time. Web hosting companies will guarantee this through the use of redundant infrastructure, constant monitoring and proactive issue resolution. Normally, an uptime rate of at least 99.9% is what you should be looking for.
Why this matters: If your website is down then it means that your users can’t access it, they will also lose trust and at the technical level search engines might penalise you. Poor uptime can have a major impact on your business, negatively affecting SEO and revenue.
Website Security
Quality web hosting will include built-in security measures in their servers or configuration that will keep your website secure. These can include firewalls, DDoS protection, malware scanning, server updates, file system folder protection and account isolation.
Why this matters: Ensuring that your website is secure will minimise security risks and protect your site against hacking or tampering. Many websites are not compromised because of bad coding or poor management, they’re compromised because of inadequate hosting security.
Scalability & Growth
Good web hosting will have the right technology in place to easily handle traffic spikes, upgrade resources and scale your website without the need to rebuild it from scratch or move to another host.
Why this matters: Scalability is crucial as your business grows and evolves. Your web hosting should not become a bottleneck as you scale your business.
Better Technical Support
One aspect that makes some web hosts stand out amongst others is by providing better support. Good technical support consists of fast response times, experienced teams and specific support to assist your needs. Locality is also important to ensure support is available at the time you need it and that they understand the context of your business.
Why this matters: Unfortunately no web host is perfect and issues do arise from time to time. When issues do occur, knowledgeable and experienced support teams can mean the difference between minutes of downtime and hours or days of lost business.
Long Term Cost Efficiency
Premium web hosting can cost more in general but cheap hosting often leads to frequent technical issues, security problems, poor support or features and lost business. When it comes to web hosting you mostly get what you pay for.
Why this matters: Investing in good web hosting can reduce long-term costs by preventing problems before they arise and giving you peace of mind in running your website and your business.
Need to talk about your web hosting or want a free site audit? Get in touch with me.
