How Web Hosting Impacts Your Business’ Success

Updated March 4, 2020

In business, just like in life, we are only as successful as the team we surround ourselves with. This doesn’t  just include your employees, IT staff, and business partners. It extends to your vendors. It includes your service providers as well. Your business could offer the best service or product in the world, but if customers can’t reliably access your site then all of that goes out the window. It’s not just downtime you need to worry about, either. If visitors have to suffer through long load times or a buggy experience, they will very quickly decide to take their business and dollars elsewhere. With so much competition out there, the customer experience online has to be as close as possible to perfect to ensure conversions.

All of this is to say that your hosting plays a big part in your business’ success. When it comes to choosing your hosting company, you obviously want the best combination of performance, price, and customer service. But how, exactly, does hosting impact your business? You’re probably thinking that you’re the one managing your site. You’re mostly in control. Not a piece of code or line of copy gets implemented without you knowing about it. That only goes so far, however. Try as you might, unless you’re running your own server farm, part of your operations will be in the hands of a third party. Here are some important factors that hosting plays a part in.

Site Speed

This is a big one. Site speed is so important to the success of your business. Think about your own behavior when you’re online; you’re looking to buy something, or maybe you just want to read an article about a topic that interests you. You click a link you came across on social media and you’re greeted by a white browser tab that keeps loading…and loading…and loading. How long do you give the site to load? A minute? Thirty seconds? Not even. You probably give it a lot less time than you realize. If you’re like about 40% of the population, you only give a site about three seconds to load. That’s right; three seconds. Then the site is abandoned and you move on. To go back to the scenario where you’re reading an article you found on social media, you’ve probably jumped from site to site to finally read the information if the initial site didn’t load fast enough. That’s because competition is so fierce.

Ecommerce behavior is similar. 40% of visitors leave if the site doesn’t load fast enough. 79% of shoppers will likely take their business elsewhere if they were not happy with the site performance during the experience of the first purchase. Additionally, each second of delay a customer experiences drops their satisfaction rate by 16%. A few seconds delay and the picture starts to become clear.

That’s why it’s important you’re signing up for the right hardware to power your site. Though they cost more, a dedicated server is the best solution for powering an ecommerce site because it provides you with the appropriate resources to ensure you have the bandwidth to handle high traffic and advanced transactions. Lower tiered hosting plans can sink your ecommerce site before it even takes off.

Security 

Make no mistake, security goes both ways. You have responsibilities and so does your hosting company, to an extent. Being careful with your email, passwords, and software installations is on you. But your hosting plays a part in your security too. Hosting companies themselves make for attractive hacking targets. You want to make sure your host has a positive reputation for thwarting hacking attempts. Built-in protection from DDOS attacks is another must-have service, which of course KnownHost offers on all of its accounts.

But, security isn’t just about defending from malicious attempts to access your site. The integrity and protection of your information is important as well. While you should always do your own due diligence and manually backup your information, having safe backups that are easily accessible via your hosting company is also important because of the time savings involved. If something happens (for example, your database gets erased) you will have a backup already staged and at the ready so you can be back in business as soon as possible. KnownHost performs regular backups for you automatically so you can have peace of mind knowing your information is safe and available should it be needed.

If that backup isn’t there, you could suffer through hours and days of having no site to conduct business from.

Uptime

Just like with site speed, uptime plays another critical role in your site’s success. When we say “uptime,” we’re referring to the amount of time your site stays online. For example, if a server gets taken offline for maintenance, no one can access your site. That’s money out the window. While it’s hard to compare your business to one of the largest ones on the planet, even a business like Amazon can suffer the effects of downtime. Amazon went offline for forty minutes and lost out on nearly five million dollars a few years ago… Now scale that to your business and you can see how damaging poor uptime statistics can be.

At KnownHost, whether it’s a VPS or dedicated server plan, you are guaranteed the industry leading 99.9% uptime. That is the best uptime you can expect when it comes to hosting.

SEO 

Finally, your hosting plays a part in your search engine optimization efforts as you try and get as high as possible in Google’s SERPs. The factors that affect your revenue and customer satisfaction are the same ones that affect your SEO. Now you see how everything is connected. Search engine crawlers respond in a similar way to the average human user (as approximate as possible). If Google’s algorithm finds that your site takes too long to load or is unreliably available, that will seriously hurt your overall quality score. As your quality score drops, so too will your site’s position in the search rankings. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your site is properly optimized for both customers and search engine crawlers.

Conclusion

Now you see just how influential your hosting can be on your bottom line. Many business owners never consider this when shopping around for a hosting company. After all, a server is a server, no? Unfortunately, that is not the case… Who you pay every month for your hosting plays a big part in the success of your business. At KnownHost, we know this and take that responsibility seriously. For years, we’ve been helping business owners migrate from hosting services that were unsatisfactory and provide them with the service they’ve been looking for.

Our plans are varied and scaled to support any kind of website installation from WordPress to a heavily trafficked ecommerce site. And we do all this with industry leading uptime, 24/7 customer service, consistently high speeds, and complimentary security measures. If you’re ready for a partner that’s going to help you do your best work, contact the team at KnownHost today.