Your Web Hosting Service Is Just As Important As Your Website

When you first delve into the world of running your own website or blog, concerns about the design, content, marketing and budget rightly hold sway. After all, you want visitors to find your site, and when they get to it, you want to make sure they decide to stick around. Once they’ve decided to spend some time perusing your virtual space, you want to ensure their experience is a good one.

Because of these concerns, most newcomers to websites put all their eggs in the website basket, and while that might seem like the right thing to do — especially at first glance — it’s actually a little shortsighted. Space on the World Wide Web that your site occupies is every bit as important as what that site looks like and how it performs. From how it affects SEO to how it affects visitor usability, here are six reasons why your Web hosting service is just as important as the design of the site itself.

Why Your Web Hosting Service Is Equally Important?

1. Reliability Is A Must

Your website needs to be up and running every millisecond of every day, regardless of the weather, the amount of streaming that’s happening on the server on which it’s hosted, the state of the stock market, or any other reason/excuse a Web hosting company might give you when its services go down. Reliability is an essential component of your visitors’ experience, whether you’re running an eCommerce website or a parenting blog, and while you might want to believe that a lousy hosting service is more about that service than it is about your site and your brand, your online audience won’t care to make the distinction. Don’t put your site and all your hard work at risk. Choose a Web hosting service with unparalleled service and that offers 99.9 percent uptime so your site is always live.

2. It Affects SEO

Search engine optimization remains an essential part of doing business in the 21st century. After all, when a potential reader or customer types a query into a search engine that fits your site’s content or products perfectly, you want your website to rise to the top of the results. It’s why keywords and quality content remain such a driving marketing concern.

Well, your Web hosting service affects the quality of your SEO, too. Just like you, search engines want people to keep coming back to use their services, so if your site loads slowly, is sometimes down, or is otherwise unreliable when clicked on, most search engines are going to send you toward the bottom of the pile, while sites that can be trusted to load every time in a speedy manner will rank near the top.

3. Usability

While much of how a website responds is due to design, Web hosting has a direct effect on some usability features. From keeping load times low to allowing for quick maneuvering around the site, when your Web hosting service is too puny to keep up with what your visitors are trying to do, you’re going to lose those visitors to someone else.

4. The Environment (No, Really!)

As climate change continues to wreak havoc on everything from the weather to Syria, environmental concerns are starting to affect which companies get—and don’t get—business. If you’re concerned about your carbon footprint and want to make eco-friendly choices, then select a Web host that runs on energy from a renewable source. The average Web server produces over 630 kg of CO2, while using 1,000 kWh of energy each year. When you choose a green Web host, those numbers can drop all the way to zero.

5. Security Issues

Security issues affect every nook and cranny of the Internet, which is why you need to opt for a Web host that can protect you from increasingly sophisticated hacks. Choose a host that takes security seriously, or plan on wishing you had done so at some point in the near future.

6. It Affects Customer Experience

Your customers and visitors deserve to have an excellent experience when they visit your website. Every website that’s powered by a sub-par hosting service puts the customer experience at risk. Instead of having to field customer service complaints on a regular basis, go to the source. Use a reliable, powerful, and secure hosting company that will keep your site up come hell or high water.

Don’t get tempted to look the other way when it comes to choosing a Web hosting service. As these six reasons show, it’s just too important to leave to chance.