Today, we’d like to share with you a summary of what website hosting is, why it’s so important to get right for your website and the positive impact great hosting can have, not just on your website but on your brand and business reputation.
A web host or hosting provider is a business that provides technological services required for a website to appear on the internet. Websites are stored on the hosting provider’s computers called servers. These are connected to extremely high speed data connections in large, secure facilities called data centers.
To host your website with a hosting provider, you will need to register a website domain name, which is the address of your new site and your email. It’s the (yoursitename).com address by which customers will find you. This can be done either via your chosen hosting provider or there are hundreds of domain name providers online. Once a domain name has been purchased, you can then login to your domain name sellers account and change what server the domain name ‘points’ to.
The last thing you need is your business website going offline as a result of your hosting provider losing connectivity, not only could this result in lost revenue, but also lost time waiting for servers to be rectified. Look out for web hosting providers with an excellent reputation in being dependable and a track record of quality.
Key features
Do they offer all the features and tools to support the type of website for your needs? An e-commerce site will have significantly different requirements to a CMS blogging platform like WordPress.
A lot of hosting providers say they provide quality support but when it comes down to it, only a handful actually practice what they preach. Quality customer support available online via chat and on the phone 24/7 is vital to ensure your receive the best TLC for your website. There’s really nothing quite like the human touch. Try them out before committing – contact them, do they respond to your queries quicky and accurately? If you do sign-up with them, test their backups – how quickly backups can be restored is a vital question to any business website owner in-case of disaster recovery.
With better quality web hosting providers you’ll not only get uninterrupted service from a robust and powerful server, but also a number of optimisation tools to make your site load even faster. Speed is a vitally important metric you should look for – it’s a fact that a faster loading website will give a great user experience and boost your SEO at the same time. Did you know that a recent survey showed visitors will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load?
As your business grows, your digital presence will too, you may want to add additional websites to your portfolio, so choosing a hosting provider with varying package options to support your growth is an important feature.
At Wider, we love and highly recommend SiteGround. They are one of the most popular and highest rated hosting providers in our industry and work seamlessly with our website platform of choice WordPress.
In fact, SiteGround is an official WordPress recommended hosting provider and you can’t get a much higher endorsement than that! It is one of only a handful of companies that have designated data centres globally across the USA, Europe and Asia allowing you to host your site close to your visitors for super efficient site loading times. We’ve been working with SiteGround for several years and find them to be fast, extremely reliable, cost efficient and fantastic in offering customer support.
If you choose to host your new website through us, we’ll ensure you can enjoy reliable, professional hosting 24/7 with a trusted supplier we’ve used for many years with our own website and our clients.
This will give you the confidence to relax and concentrate on growing your business knowing your website is in safe hands!
