Your online business, e-commerce website or a blog, has only a few minutes or even seconds to amaze your visitors and turn them into customers. Your website needs excellent features to accomplish this goal.
The success of your online business depends on the availability of the website, or uptime, the speed, how fast the site loads, and the security of information, personal and financial, you store on your website, among many other things.
Maximum uptime, incredible Speed, security, are the most critical issues relating to the performance of your website or online business, and they have a direct correlation to the quality of the web hosting service you chose.
A quality web host ensures that your website will be available all the time to the visitors, loads fast, and maintains the security of the information stored. On the contrary, a bad host may lack in one or most of these features and ruin your business altogether.
Recent research shows that not many businesses do not prioritize hosting. Instead, they focus mainly on design, content, SEO, and graphics. However, choosing a bad web host may prove detrimental to your business goals and affect the survival and existence of your business.
Here is how a bad web host can damage your business
#1 – Speed:
Industry experts say, internet users, wait only a few seconds, six seconds in most cases before they move to another site if your website does not impress them. If your site takes too long to show up, visitors may not have the time, switch to another site taking away your business to your competitors.
The ideal speed range for a website to load in 0.8 seconds, 94% of web speed, – 5 seconds, 25% of web speed. Anything lower than these loading speeds would negatively impact your brand image and question the existence of your business.
#2 – Uptime:
Uptime is the availability or accessibility of your website for visitors. If visitors cannot access your site around the clock, then you are losing out the business to your competitors. It may be almost impossible for web hosts to offer 100% uptime, but you need to make sure your site is up and running for more than 99% of the time.
You need to check web host policy regarding their downtime. Downtime issues may come up on account of technical component failures, regular maintenance issues, etc., in any case, downtime for more extended periods would affect your business both in the short run and long run.
#3 – Technical knowledge:
A wrong web host service provider may not have the technical expertise to handle issues specific to your website. Without proper technical knowledge, they may not offer quick help while setting up your website, or connecting to the database, downtime, or in case of any other technical issues.
Technical glitches in your system may cause frustration to your visitors, customers and result in connection errors, payment errors, etc., which makes your brand unreliable and drives customers away from your website.
#4 – Bandwidth:
The amount of data that your visitors can download from your website is called bandwidth. As an online business, you need to have higher bandwidth, especially if you run a high traffic site, so you can handle any amount of traffic visiting and trying to access information from your website.
However, the low-quality web host may not offer higher bandwidth meaning your website cannot handle even slightly higher traffic. When you go with a low-cost web host, you may not handle higher traffic volumes than your regular traffic. Visitors may not be able to access your site, experience lower speeds, accessing the site or downloading information all leading to frustration among visitors and turning away from your website to a competitor’s site.
#5 – Security:
Security of personal and financial information is a serious concern in the internet age. With so much confidential information stored on your website, it becomes your responsibility to maintain the privacy and secrecy of such information.
When you chose a cheap web host, they may not offer the latest and right security tools. In which case, your website becomes easy prey for hackers who use the latest tools to penetrate a vulnerable site. Failure to do so would result in not only damaging your brand reputation and loss of business but also you may have to end up paying hefty fines to the governments and your customers.
A Bad web host lacks the above-mentioned features, and may not offer the right quality of service that your website requires. Such a web host would impact your business negatively and results in
Reliability:
With frequent downtimes rendering your site inaccessible to the visitors, customers find it hard to rely on your brand and may look for an alternate business website that is available always to fulfill their shopping needs, etc.
Scalability:
Unlike a quality web host that offers impressive flexibility of bandwidth, to accommodate any number of visitors to your website, a cheap web host offers low bandwidth making it impossible to handle peak hour traffic of slightly higher than normal traffic leading to losing your customers to competitors.
Support:
A low-cost web host may not have enough staff, trained staff or the technical expertise to help you with the issues that your website may encounter.
This leads to your site being inaccessible to the visitors. As a result, your customers may go to your competition.
Revenue loss:
Most of the reasons cited above results in your customers going to your competitors and taking your business there, resulting in damages to your business. In addition, your website suffers from security issues, and loss of private and confidential information lands your business in serious legal problems, fines, and penalties.
Conclusion
With an online business you expect to reach out to a broader, larger audience and run your business round the clock, you need an amazingly high-quality web host service that can help you run your business without worrying much about the technical or billing issues of the website.
