The Importance Of Reliable Hosting
Here in the UK, more than 75% of individuals are making a purchase online at least once a month. From small-scale purchases to larger purchases and even investments.
If your business relies solely on online sales and communication, having your website down can be as detrimental as having no electricity in your bricks-and-mortar store. So why is it vital for businesses to have reliable hosting?
Signs Of Unreliable Hosting
When it comes to hosting your website, there are several signs that your hosting is not as reliable as it needs to be. When you start to notice the below issues, it is time to consider moving hosting provider, or changing your hosting solutions to better suit your business needs.
The first sign to keep an eye out for is a slow site speed. While this could be related to a number of development and design factors, including HTML and excessive images, it could also be due to your hosting. Shared hosting, while a cheaper solution can see sites loading slower where the bandwidth is being used elsewhere.
If you are experiencing several outages, there could be a couple of hosting-related concerns. For example, your website may be too large or have a higher traffic load than the server can handle. Alternatively, it could be security related, which brings us to our next sign:
Below-average server security can leave your website vulnerable to attacks. From causing website outages to the loss or cloning of customer details and full DDoS attacks. Not only can this be detrimental to your website, but it can also cause data breaches that will affect your customers.
Finally, tracking your interactions with the hosting team can be important. With your business in their hands, it is important that they are helpful and accommodating. This includes 24-hour contactability and swift help when issues arise.
Benefits Of Reliable Hosting
Of course, there are a number of benefits to reliable hosting, such as having up to 100% uptime for your website. Here are just a couple of the key benefits:
Secure
With around one cyber attack every 39 seconds happening across the internet, the importance of website security has never been more prevalent. With small cyber-attacks going unnoticed, and larger attacks taking large websites offline for elongated periods of time having a secure server is vital to a business.
A secure hosting provider will offer a selection of measures, including firewalls, regular site back-ups and other safety measures to secure the server. A reliable provider should also recommend that the business purchases its own SSL certificate to aid the security of its website.
Dependable
Being dependable relates to the outage time that you would expect your site to be online for. Above 99% uptime is ideal, while still allowing for scheduled downtime, including time for security updates and server maintenance.
This doesn’t mean just taking their word for it, take a look at reviews and speaking to existing clients, many will be happy to give you an honest opinion. Here at Netbiz, we’ll even be happy to put you in touch with other clients to give you that peace of mind.
Scalable
As your business grows, and traffic to your website increases, you want to ensure that your hosting provider is ready to grow with you. Over time, our websites change to accommodate trends, this means that the size of your website will hopefully grow.
While your site may have started as a small-scale site, on a shared server, as it grows, a reliable provider should have the facility to provide a scalable package that grows with you. This includes ensuring that there is available and expanding storage space and processing ability to grow with you. And even moving to a dedicated server should the requirement arise.
Helpful
As the biggest source of income for many businesses, ensuring that there is support when issues arise is vital. This means that having a helpful hosting provider can take away many of the concerns we have regarding down websites.
While many hosting issues are resolved by the provider, a helpful team will be able to discuss what causes issues or concerns and offer solutions as to how to mitigate them moving forward. Not to mention that they can typically get your website up and running following an outage with little concern.
Hosting Solutions From Netbiz
Here at Netbiz, we offer reliable hosting solutions for businesses of all sizes. From shared hosting solutions to dedicated servers our knowledgeable team of experts are on hand to discuss your business needs and ensure that you have the right hosting solution to suit.
For more information on dedicated hosting solutions, or the likes of DDoS protection, please contact the team today and one of our dedicated account managers will be happy to discuss this with you.