Everything is in place: pictures are professional, content is clever and snappy, and services are competitive.
However, sometimes, even the coolest websites just can’t seem to get the business they serve off the ground. This may be in part due to your hosting provider: small problems add up and your brand ends up getting hurt!
Here are 4 common problems you might run into if your hosting isn’t up to the task and is working against you.
1. Your website is too slow.
You want your website to react well, and fast! Ideally, a page should always load under 3 seconds, because users aren’t patient. This also matters for visibility, because search engines give importance to the loading speed of a page when they position search results. That’s why a page that loads quickly will appear higher in Google’s result list.
A good server will offer tools to minimize the loading time of a page, but make sure you have a programmer to help you with the installation.
2. Your web pages aren’t safe (the little lock doesn’t appear in the address bar)
When it comes to websites, safety means trust and reputation. People will be seriously more keen on buying something online or filling out an information sheet if they can see that little lock icon in their browser.
Malicious hackings are always a possibility, no matter your host. You are never completely safe. What matters, is that you have the resources to close the security breach and remove the malicious script before it can cause damage and hurt your reputation. For that, updates should be done as often as possible (every day, ideally) and you should make sure to have an SSL certificate (that’s what shows the little lock icon at the top of the page to prove it’s safe).
3. It doesn’t show flexibility when it comes to adding new modules and projects as your business grows
A problem that comes up often with small companies and their website is that the owner will want to add on smaller projects under the same hosting. A contest, a new email address, new sub-domains as the business expands, etc. With a simple host like GoDaddy, for instance, adding on new changes as they come up gets really complicated, really fast, because the structure is not adaptable at all. Your hands are tied pretty fast.
A good host will offer a lot of support options during configuration of email addresses, sub-domains, user accounts, keys, SSL certificates, backup, and all those technical elements, so that you don’t have to relocate your entire site as soon as you want to add on a new element.
4. The backup system isn’t prepared for the worst.
Hosting should always come with a backup plan. Good ones do, anyway. Because even if everything is in place to prevent any problem, there can always be material damage, a hack, a crash, or corrupted data for one reason or another. Like with insurance, we don’t realize how important having it is until something terrible happens.
A web host will have a backup plan in case of catastrophe. With the hosting system we use here at FortuneLab, we can do daily backups to minimize potentiel losses and get the website up and running as fast as possible.
Do you believe your hosting is working against you? Act now, before your reputation suffers.