KNOWNHOST BLOG

Smart Designer’s Guide to Web Hosting

Updated November 12, 2018

 

 

Smart Designer’s Guide to Hosting 2018

 

smart designer

 

Index of What’s Included

Executive Summary

The Keys to Design Agency Success
Impressions
Retention
Profitability
Time

The Science Behind Hosting for Designers

Hosting Features That Matter Most to Designers
Specifications
Performance
Cost
Dependability
Centralized Management
Managed Services & Support

Design Measures Influenced by Hosting Decisions
Portfolio Load Time
Trust Signal Presence
Issue Response Time
Dependability / Uptime
Management Time Overhead

About KnownHost

design

Executive Summary

 

Discover all the ways hosting choices can influence design agency success.  From prospect perceptions to tech support nightmares waiting to happen, this guide shares what you need to know, from a no nonsense perspective – by a company that hosts many successful design agency accounts.  Enjoy your web hosting guide for designers – hope you like it 🙂

 

Packed to the brim with real world experience, updated facts and figures, plus a focus on specific examples, this guide has been created to make your life easier – so that you will be able to make more effective hosting decisions as you will be left knowing more, able to do more and ready to take your design agency head to head against the competition, through better hosting decisions.

 

Note: The author of this guide is the Marketing Manager at KnownHost.com, the USA-based managed hosting experts who have long dominated traditional managed VPS and now cloud VPS hosting</strong, globally.  Prior roles include ownership of a Scottish webdesign agency as well as directing the marketing and product management of technology and software companies with revenues of over $1 Billion across two continents.

 

be smart

 

The Keys to Design Agency Success

 

Profitable designers know four areas which can make or break their business:
First Impressions – a well ranked, easily navigated, fast loading portfolio
Client Retention – keeping customers happy while gaining new referrals
Profitability – controlling costs via value-centered purchases
Time – maximizing time on projects – minimizing time on distractions

 

Designers are like Mister Fantastic, (Reed Richards) on The Fantastic Four.  They are brilliant, but prone to getting pulled in all directions, stretching to their limits of time and money, because of the variety of demands placed upon them by clients, and technical matters alike.  While the customer is always right (most of the time), a successful design agency will find ways to reduce pain points – so that there are less reasons a customer could complain, and more time available to deal with profit-driving activities.  

 


Top Tip:  Don’t try to do everything at once – instead prioritize urgent and important tasks.  Removing distractions is the goal – not being everywhere at once.


 

design agency

 

The Science Behind Hosting for Designers

 

Check the Internet and you’ll find thousands of sites with tips and tricks on HTML5, CSS, Javascript, PHP – and hundreds of other topics on the mechanical execution of turning designs into real websites.  They don’t tell you how to run a winning agency.  They also don’t tell you why hosting matters to your business.

 

The author of this guide has owned a website design agency in Scotland, worked in tandem with dozens of designers (as a search marketing expert) and now manages the marketing at KnownHost, a global managed hosting provider that provides hosting for many top design agencies globally. 

 

The knowledge from this combination of hard-knocks, education, testing and implementation has been distilled into the Smart Designer’s Guide to Hosting.  It’s freely shared with you, in the hope that you avoid the pitfalls and enjoy the successes that can come from putting this knowledge into practice.

 

On an average, 8 out of 10 consumers would stop engaging with a site if its content doesn’t display properly on their device.

 

Hosting Features That Matter Most to Designers

 

When designers choose hosting plans, they should be looking at:

Specifications
Performance
Dependability
Centralized Management
Cost
Support

 


Top Tip:  Anyone can offer cheap unmanaged hosting, but you need to find fast, dependable, easily managed, affordable, fully supported hosting.


 

 

list headed specifications

Specification Basics

 

Minimum Recommended Specifications

RAM  2 GB

DRIVE 60 GB

XFER  2 TB

IPV4  2 IP

PANEL  cPanel (or DirectAdmin)

MGT  Fully Managed

BACKUP  Fully Automated

 

Specification Details

With a poor spec hosting plan, a website will be slow to respond to requests, transfer text, images and scripts.  Design agencies need sufficient resources for their site, and their client sites, to respond quickly, avoid timeouts, and never have contention issues.

 

For example, Magento.  A design agency hosting a handful of

 

Slow loading times for images cause 39% of users to stop engagement with a website. If delays are encountered during peak traffic times, 75% of users will click off the page and head to competitors’ websites.

 

Some of the key specs to focus on include:

 

RAM

The hosting requirements of basic html/css websites are remarkably different than those of a massive ecommerce shop like Magento.  A guide cannot tell you how exactly much memory or drive space your particular situation will require.

 

However, a good hosting company will have salespeople available who know what questions to ask, so that you can select the perfect hosting plan.

 

When comparing plans between various providers, make sure that you’re comparing available memory to available memory, and not comparing available to burstable (or similar terms being used for short term availability only).

 

Generally speaking, for a VPS, there’s little point in running one with under 2GB of RAM.  When you get down to 1GB or 1.5GB, you suddenly need to make sacrifices to keep things running (like not having a control panel).

 

DRIVE (Storage) Size

When choosing storage, be sure to compare like to like.  There’s a monumental difference in performance between network file systems (SAN, NAS, NFS), local hard disk drives (5400 RPM IDE, 7200 RPM, 10000 RPM SCSI, +++) and solid state disk drives (SSD).

 

Getting 1 TB of poor performing hard drive space is not better than getting 100 GB of ultra-fast SSD!

 

If you want to safely choose high performing hardware – go with SSD.

 

Storage Type (RAID)

Most desktop computers don’t rely on a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), though nowadays most all server environments do so.

 

There are many types of RAID, depending on whether you want pure speed (like RAID 0), a simple mirroring in case one drive fails (RAID 1), or a combination of performance and fault tolerance (RAID 10 also called RAID 1+0 or RAID 0+1).

 

If you don’t care about downtime in case of drive failure and have great backups you can rely on, then maybe you feel lucky enough to go with RAID 0.

 

On the other hand, if you want that piece of mind that comes with having 2 drives with exactly the same data being written to them, but don’t need a fast website for your visitors, then maybe RAID 1 is your cup of tea.

 

In our experience, RAID 10 is the only business solution that makes sense – giving you speed and redundancy, the best of both worlds.

 

Network Speed (transfer per second)

It hasn’t been that many years ago that 10 mbit/s network cards were common in most hosting environments.  At that time, web pages relied less on massive images and videos, and could easily serve up many simultaneous users with that connection speed.

 

Those times have changed.  The ‘tube generation’ has encouraged companies, large and small, to put gigabytes of video on their websites while simultaneously pushing the envelope with larger and larger image sizes, and quantities.

 

100 mbit/s can work for many SME websites, while 1 gbit/s, or faster, is required for large corporate hosting.

 

Just be sure you’re checking this, amongst all providers, before you commit.  It wouldn’t be good if you got stuck trying to push out a ton of video the size of bowling balls through a network pipe built like a soda straw.

 

Network Throughput (monthly transfer)

Network speed is one thing, like having 3G, 4G or 5G via mobile.  Not matter how fast your transfer speed, you are still going to be facing possible allocation limits – the amount you can transfer each month.  A fast network just enables you to use up your full allocation that much faster, leaving you with a charge for the overage at the end of the month – or worse, an account suspension!

 

Some advertise their allowed transfer in GB’s or TB’s per month.  Others advertise theirs as unlimited** (note the asterisks point to the fine print where you find out about their Terms of Service and what happens if you use too much).

 

Make sure you know how much you can actually transfer, and know how much you are likely to need.  

 


Top Tip:  Don’t rely on unlimited without checking first.  99.9% of unlimited plans – aren’t! There are always limits of some kind to protect servers and networks from overuse.


 

Control Panel (which ones can be used, like cPanel)

While not every VPS or dedicated server comes with a control panel, the vast majority of site owners find a control panel to be an absolute must – saving them time and effort, daily.

 

There’s nothing worse than having spent the last 5 or 10 years using cPanel (or another panel), then signing up with a new host, only to find out that they have some proprietary panel designed in the Pleistocene Era.  Suddenly, nothing you’ve learned over the past decade is going to help in figure out this Rubik’s cube.

 

Make sure your favorite control panel is available and what it will cost to add-on to your hosting plan price.

 


Top Tip:  Get a standard control panel like cPanel or DirectAdmin.  The pain of migrating to/from a proprietary or no-name control panel is ridiculous and avoidable.


 

Domains and Email Accounts

Some hosting companies will limit how many domain accounts you can add to your hosting plan.  

 

Others will allow you 1 primary domain and the rest have to be add-on domains.

 

The difference lies with how difficult it is to administer, especially when migrating accounts from one hosting company to another, or making backups you can easily send to clients.

 

It’s important to know how many domains and how many email addresses (and databases) you can create with a given hosting plan.  Being surprised later, is definitely not fun.

 

Fast Fact:  There are now more than 1,000 top level domains (TLD’s) and roughly 400 million domains hosted on the internet, with 5 billion email addresses in use.

 

Premium Hardware/Network

The difference between cheapest price and best value hosting companies often is most easily spotted in the server room.  

 

Are they running latest and greatest hardware, routers and monitoring software?  Can your server get updates without forcing a reboot (and having downtime)?

 

A simple speed-test of some files or websites, when loaded on multiple different hosts is one way of telling the performance of one company versus another, but not definitive.

 

There are many speed-test tools out there, but a few of our favorites are:

Pingdom https://tools.pingdom.com

Google PageSpeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

GTmetrix gtmetrix.com

 

If you’re going to be running WordPress, test a couple of WordPress-based sites on any prospective hosting company, before you commit.  If their sites are as slow as molasses, yours probably will be slow as well.

 

Cheaper hardware often reveals itself, not with simple speed tests, but with critical failures that require downtime to fix.  

 

Downtime statistics are one of the most common ways of spotting those companies who have invested in infrastructure and those who haven’t (high value vs low price companies).

 

Checking downtime of a company versus their competition can be done by going to sites like:

Hyperspin http://www.hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=2&i=10&d=90&s=10

 


Top Tip:  Sign-up with a hosting company AFTER you’ve checked their uptime.  An unreliable host is an unnecessary risk and rarely leads to any real savings.


 

Performance (speed)

 

Performance Details

Hosting performance is influenced by several factors and measured in several ways, the most important of which include:

 

Page Speed

Hardware selection, available resources, network throughput and contention all impact page speed.

 

Optimizations and server software selection can also play a role.  You often don’t know until you test, or read reviews of others as to how well things are going to go.

 

There are many speed-test tools out there, but a few of our favorites are:

Pingdom https://tools.pingdom.com

Google PageSpeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

GTmetrix https://gtmetrix.com

 

Network Location

Make sure that you’re checking the speed from a location close to your target audience – there’s no point in thinking a server is fast for USA people when your audience is in Holland.

 


Top Tip:  Use a GEOIP lookup tool to see where a domain or IP is located (though they could be using a CDN to appear closer to where YOU are at.


 

price versus value

 

Price / Cost

 

Cost Details

The price of hosting can be as simple as a single all-inclusive fee or it can be the base cost plus published extras (and any hidden gotcha costs that crop up unexpectedly).

 

Base Cost / Month

The starting point with pricing is where to begin with the basic cost/price per month.  This is the starting point advertised plan price as advertised and often is just a reference point – most people never pay this small of an amount.

 

In fact, the price people actually pay can often be multiples of the advertised cost – this is just a starting point!

 

extra

 

Typical Extras

There are many, many extras which can drive up the price of hosting each month, such as:

 

Fully Managed – not standard with many companies

Priority Support – some charge extra for ‘good’ support

Control Panels – the panel and license package for things like cPanel

Billing Panels – like WHMCS or Blesta almost always are extra

Bundles – things like Softaculous or other 1-click installers may add a small fee

SSD vs HDD – storage type upgrades can be costly

Storage Size – getting more space for your files, email and databases

Monthly Transfer – additional GB or TB of data xfer

Backups – adding backups, more frequently, or drive space to accommodate

CDN – bundled content delivery networks for offloading files to speed things along

LiteSpeed – performance comes at a cost, usually

LiteSpeed Cache/LiteMage – again more performance with an associated cost

Datacenter Choice – not always an added cost, but can have premium locations

Premium Bandwidth – rarely an add-on cost, usually embedded in base price

 

Hidden Costs

Often one-offs, or under certain circumstances, these can be surprising, are usually not really optional, and can be the only way to get your account out of a suspended status or files migrated to another host:

 

Tax – some display prices without tax, some with – be sure to check this

Setup Fees – one off setup fees are a common hidden gotcha

Migration Fees – one site included, or all, or no migration help available?

Support Admin – sometimes support is tiered, with some items covered and others not

 

Going over on usage is one of the most worrisome because it can have the biggest impact.  Accounts can be suspended, so files can’t even be downloaded to move to a different provider.  Some will send exorbitant bills for using too much resources, drive space, monthly transfer, or combination of the above – with threats of what will happen if you don’t pay, since you agreed to this when signing up – as a legally binding agreement!

 

Check reviews on independent sites to reveal companies who use such tactics – so you can avoid repeating the mistakes of others.

 

Special Savings Available

Before committing to a purchase, it pays to check and see what discounts, coupons or special offers are available.  Some ways of saving money include:

 

Multi-Server Discount – sign-up for more than one to get a price break

Extended Prepayment – paying in advance for a longer term can often save a tidy sum

Special Promo / Coupon – search for {brand name} coupon or {brand name} promo code

 


Top Tip:  Use live chat or call the hosting company sales team BEFORE signing up, mention the fact you want a better discount offer, and give them a chance to quote you happy.


 

robot sprinting quickly

 

Dependability 

Being dependable means a lot.  In fact, for many, dependability is the #1 decision making criteria in choosing a host, and means things like:

 

Uptime

The ideal web hosting company would be up 100% of the time, never having any downtime for any reason, ever.  While that’s not possible for extended periods, it’s something most great hosts strive to achieve.

 

Top Tip:  You can check how well various web hosting companies are performing by checking on independent 3rd party providers like Hyperspin.

Support Response Time / Resolution

Hopefully, you never need to contact a web hosts support team, but when you do, you need to know that they’ll respond in a timely manner.  Initial support response time is an important metric.

 

Getting a response and getting a solution aren’t the same thing.  So, how fast a hosting company support team actually resolves your issue is huge, and is one big measure of dependability.

 

The biggest problem for resolution times is that there are no truly independent measures of this.  Every site we’ve checked online has affiliate links and is compensated for posting response times with links to hosting company plans for sale.  Compensation brings measures into question, bigtime!

 

Therefore, we recommend you check reviews on Facebook, Google, and similar well trusted review sites where you can find out what real customers say about those hosting companies.

     Facebook Reviewshttps://www.facebook.com/KnownHost/reviews

     Google Reviewshttps://www.google.com/maps/place/KnownHost+LLC/@39.9036772,-75.5647848,17z/data=!4m7!3m6!1s0x89c6f03c2ff25979:0x18dd8ecb5cab9c78!8m2!3d39.9036772!4d-75.5625961!9m1!1b1

     WebHostingHero Reviewshttps://www.webhostinghero.com/reviews/knownhost/

 

Billing Accuracy

Getting surprise items on your invoice is no fun.  Knowing how much you’ll pay, and getting answers anytime you have billing questions is important.  It’s a part of overall dependability.

 

Know where to turn for questions and how to escalate things if you don’t get satisfactory answers.

 

There are often separate contact details for different purposes.  For example, at KnownHost:

Billing Supporthttps://my.knownhost.com/client/login

Technical Supporthttps://support.knownhost.com/

Full Contact (with phone #’s)https://www.knownhost.com/contact

 

Backups

Knowing that you have backups is one thing.  Knowing that you have backups that can be restored fully is another.  A dependable host will have backups available. A great host will set up those backups for you, so you don’t have to worry about them again.

 

Fast Fact:  35% of websites experiencing data loss did not have current backups.  25% of those restoring backups had backups fail, while 12% had corrupted backups.

 

It’s great if you have good backups – but do you have the time and know-how to restore them properly?  Fully managed hosting that includes backup restoration assistance is a life saver.

 

Fast Fact:  28% of backup restorations are either incomplete or won’t restore at all.

 


Top Tip:  Get managed hosting and make sure the admin team has set up your backups for you.  Save time while retaining piece of mind.


 

managed services cgi

 

Centralized Management

When you have multiple domains that you manage or control, such as the case for many website design agencies, there are a lot of systems you’ll need to login to regularly, like:

cPanel
WHM
Domain Registrar
SSL Cert Management
Email
Support Portal
SSH
FTP
etc, etc, etc

 

Having to managing the security credentials, applications required, sharing access with key people like staff and clients, and so on, all take a ton of time and effort.

 

Project managing your hosting, when you have a dozen suppliers and systems is a great way to burn your available time with zero return for that effort.  Much like remodeling your bathroom, where you need a tiler, carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter – coordinating many different aspects is a giant time suck that doesn’t save you any real money – because your time is worth real money!

 


Top Tip:  Centralize your hosting, domain registration and SSL cert purchases through a single highly trusted company to slash wasted time on your part.


 

Managed Services & Support

Service differences amongst managed service providers are massive.  Here’s some of what we expect, at a minimum, to be included with managed hosting (but you should confirm before signing up with a new provider):

 

Migration Assistance

Moving files/accounts from one host to another (using same control panel in most cases).

 

Control Panel Installation

Installing and configuring the control panel during the provisioning process.

 

Operating System Optimization

Post-install optimizations to improve efficiency and performance.

 

Security Hardening

Post-install configuration changes to improve system security.

 

Fast Fact:  86% of tested websites had at least one security vulnerability, with some having as many as 56.

 

Fast Fact:  The wrong firewall can allow 60% of traffic through without even scanning it.

 

Operating System & Control Panel Updates

Keeping the system core components updated in a timely manner.

 

Repair / Troubleshooting / Reinstallation

When things have been corrupted or otherwise gone horribly wrong with systems including cPanel, mail services, web service, mysql/maria DB, nameservers and ftp service, to name but a few.

 

Technical Support

Generally speaking, you want a tech support team that’s filled with technical experts who speak fluent English and who are available during the hours of the day, and days of the week, in which you’re going to have problems (could be any time 24 x 7 x 365).

 

Tech support should be a one and done situation.  You put in a ticket, the person responds within 5 or so minutes, and that person takes care of the problem.  Organizations that silo their staff, so that you need to be transferred a half-dozen times from one department to another, from one tech to another, only to find that hours later and you still have the problem – are to be avoided.

 

Tech support should be judged based on availability, ability to resolve in one contact, willingness to help, no additional cost per incident – and whether they have a server management team to help with all the day to day server management matters that running a website entails.

 


Top Tip:  Buying unmanaged hosting is like a new car without tires.  Why? Why? Why would you want something like unmanaged hosting?  It makes little sense for just a few cents difference.


 

kpi diagram

 

Design Measures Influenced by Hosting Decisions

 

The design agency Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are often impacted by hosting choices include:
Portfolio Load Time
Trust Signal Presence
Issue Response Time
Dependability / Uptime
Management Time Overhead

 

Portfolio Load Time

Modern companies rely on organic traffic to bring new prospects to their website, introducing the brand, creating affinity and eventually turning those prospects into paying customers.

 

Organic visitors arrive on site (often their first impression) and will either be impressed with your work and the speed with which pages and images load, consuming more and more as they become interested further, or they will be frustrated by how slow the site is and leave (‘bounce’) within seconds.

 

Fast Fact:  You have 10 seconds to leave an impression and tell them what they’ll get out of your website and company. After this time (and oftentimes before), they’ll leave.  47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

 

You control your website hosting – by choosing one vendor over another.  That means you control whether you’re hosted on a high-performance server, with blazing fast image loads and instant page refreshes, or you’re hosted on a slow/sporadic loading server that gives a terrible user experience.  Hosting is a decision you make – and can be corrected easily – by changing hosts.

 

For every second, over 2 seconds, that a page takes to load, you will lose about 5% of visitors.

 

Read that statistic again.  You will give a bad impression that results in 5% of your prospective new customers leaving your site and shopping with the competition for every 1 second of page load time.

 

Portfolio load time can stop the flow of new customers to your site, frustrate existing customers who might otherwise buy more, and cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

 

Fast Fact:  A visitor takes only 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your site. So if your site design doesn’t form a good first impression, a lot of your potential customers will simply leave.

 

Trust Signal Presence

When a business owner or manager is seeking out a designer to make their next website, they’re looking for reasons to BUY FROM YOU.  Leave out these necessary ingredients, and they’ll lose interest and shop elsewhere.

 

What are the types of things that someone expects to see on a designer site?  What are those things that inspire trust?

 

  1.  A telephone number.  They’ve got to be able to reach you to ask questions, get support, give details.  No phone – no sale.
  2.  An address nearby (same country, same state, same city – it all depends on the nature of the company).  No address means you might not even really exists.
  3.  An https:// web address (SSL).  Who runs site without SSL these days?  No one.
  4.  Testimonials from happy customers.  Include them for max results.
  5.  Reviews from unbiased sites.  Link to your outstanding reviews on search engines, social and review sites for maximum credibility.
  6.  Prices.  If you can’t show your prices, you’re killing the sales funnel (and not in a good way).
  7.  Logos.  Essential ingredient in this day and age.  Show who buys from you and others will buy from you.

 

How does hosting impact these trust signals?

 

Offline Sites Do Not Inspire Trust

 

In order to work, trust signals must be seen by visitors.  They have to be seen clearly, quickly, without flicker, without stutter and without a 404, 501 or other error message.

 

If your hosting is unpredictable, prone to being throttled due to a lack of resources, or goes offline inexplicably – your revenue will suffer.  Your client revenue will suffer – and your revenue will suffer even more.

 

A website that’s offline costs you money every minute it’s unavailable.

 

Fast Fact:  Your site must show an overall business rating and customer testimonials on the homepage. 85% of customers trust online reviews and testimonials as much as personal recommendations.

 


Top Tip:  Choose a web host that has proven dependability.  Check monitoring sites like HyperSpin.  Uptime should be monitored across hundreds of servers and data publicly visible.


 

Slow Sites Do Not Inspire Trust

 

Hosting is to trust signals what bad breath is to cocktail party conversation….  It doesn’t matter what you say – if you’re breath is patently offensive at a distance of 3 feet, no one cares if you’re going to reveal the secret to eternal youth or where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

 

In much the same way, you can have a mountain of high quality trust signals, a beautiful portfolio and great prices.  No one is going to notice any of that if you are hosted on a poor performing server.

 


Top Tip:  Choosing the cheapest possible hosting solution is a ridiculous proposition, much like choosing unmanaged hosting over managed hosting.  Either way, the difference is a few dollars per month.  Isn’t your business worth more than a few dollars?


 

Issue Response Time

If you’re an ordinary business – one hosting issue impacts one website.  When you’re a design agency, one hosting issue can impact hundreds of websites – because many design agencies make significant recurring revenue by including web hosting as one of their services.  Most designers are hosting resellers.

 

Technical support at your hosting company is absolutely critical to your recurring revenue.  You can’t count on repeat business from people who are constantly emailing you, or calling you, to complain about their website or email.

 

No hosting company is going to admit they have crap technical support.  Many will claim how great they are, knowing it’s far from the truth.  How can you know who’s actually good at delivering on their promises?  Independent Reviews!

 


Top Tip:  Check Google, Feefo, Facebook, Whoishostingthis, Hostadvice, TrustPilot, WebHostingTalk.  Try it…  Go to your favorite search engine and put in:  KnownHost reviews   and see what the results say.  


 

 

Uptime

Being dependable is more than just being predictable.  That’s part of the equation – an important part of it.  But there’s more than just whether or not a host has sporadic performance.

 

Uptime tells you how many minutes, hours, days, etc, a host is offline in a month.  You can’t run a business on anything less than 99.9% uptime.

 

99.0% uptime = 1.0% downtime.  That’s 7.3 hours per month you could be offline.  An entire business day is 8 hours.  1% downtime is catastrophic!

99.9% uptime = 0.1% downtime.  Thats 43.8 minutes per month you could be offline.  It’s nearly an hour.  0.1% downtime is not ideal, but not the end of the world.

99.99% uptime = 0.01% downtime.  That’s under 5 minutes per month of being offline.  That’s not perfect, but not terrible.

 

KnownHost guarantees 99.9% uptime but averages better than 99.993% uptime (offline about 3 minutes a month).

 

Note:  Uptime includes necessary maintenance, planned upgrades – everything and anything.  Your customers don’t care the reason why – the just demand great service.

 

Users spend an average of 5.94 seconds looking at a website’s main image.  Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s written content.

 

Management Time Overhead

Managing a design agency means wearing many hats.  Unfortunately, switching hats, getting up to speed, logging in to various systems, all takes time.  Your time.

 

One key aspect in managing an agency is your personal time management.  The more time you can spend on revenue generating activities, the better, just like – the less time you spend dealing with hosting, the better.

 

Hosting is more than just paying the monthly bill.  It’s making sure your (and your client) sites don’t use excessive resources, have all the latest updates applied – to avoid hacking, keeping email servers off blacklists, performing security hardening, keeping SSL certs up to date, and 1000 other tasks, many of which won’t rear their head until after they’ve bitten you on the backside!

 

By choosing quality managed hosting you can put a proactive team of externals in motion, taking care of things as tasks, rather than firefighters.

 


Top Tip:  Minimize your management overhead while reducing hosting nightmares by choosing quality managed hosting that puts a team of professionals in a position to take care of your hosting needs.


 

 

keyboard

 

Helpful Resources

 

The KnownHost website includes a blog, wiki and discussion forums filled with thousands of pages of helpful informational resources available for those wanting to learn more, solve problems, share with others or just engage with fellow site owners and the KnownHost team.

 

Blog – https://www.knownhost.com/blog/

The KnownHost blog contains hundreds of helpful articles relating to hosting, marketing, running a successful small business and more.

 

Wiki – https://www.knownhost.com/kb/

The KnownHost wiki has nearly 1,000 pages dedicated to explaining the ins and outs of hosting, mostly via how-to posts with complete instructions on accomplishing hosting administrative matters. more.

 

Forums – https://www.knownhost.com/forums/

The KnownHost forums have thousands of discussion threads where fellow site owners ask, and answer, questions.  KnownHost staff are always on hand to help give directions, point to resources, answer questions and interact with site owners.

 

knownhost logo

 

About KnownHost

 

KnownHost has been the reigning champ – the most dependable managed hosting provider ON THE PLANET for many years.

 

With offerings ranging from inexpensive shared cloud and specialist WordPress hosting, up to and including ultra high performance SSD VPS and KVM Cloud VPS plans, as well as dedicated servers, KnownHost has built a stellar reputation by using premium networks, premium hardware and premium technical support experts to service each and every client.

 

KnownHost is THE preferred choice of smart marketers everywhere.  Some of the reasons people choose KnownHost managed hosting plans include:

   

  • Free Setup
  • Free Optimization
  • Free DDoS Protection
  • Free Backups
  • 24/7 Expert Support
  • 99.99%+ Uptime
  • Instant Setup
  • 4 Datacenters
  • USA Support Center
  • Premium Network
  • Premium Hardware
  • Money Back Guarantee
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