Every business these days knows that having a presence on the Internet is essential for success. Potential customers often turn to the Internet for information about local businesses or to find solutions to the various problems they are facing. A business’ website is critical to turn people searching for information into customers who hopefully continue to patronize the business.
While companies are constantly think of how to increase their presence on social media sites, create a slick website design and use blog posts to draw in more customers, the fact of the matter is choosing a high-quality hosting company, like http://www.VirtualHosting.com, is one of the most important decisions a business can make. The hosting company a business chooses greatly impacts the business’ online presence in a number of ways.
Web users can be notoriously impatient. If a website such as a company’s blog takes too long to load, users quickly move on to a page that loads instantaneously. The rate that a website downloads is mostly affected by the hosting company and its servers. You want to use a company that has robust enough servers to handle the traffic that will come to your blog, because if the blog takes too long to download or is not available, users will move on and they might never return.
You put quite a bit of faith in a hosting company. That company is hired to protect your website, one of the most important marketing tools a company can have these days. Websites are attacked by hackers. Sometimes natural disasters strike, causing numerous websites to go down for hours or even days. And there are times when a company suddenly becomes the center of attention and a flood of users go to the business’ website. You need a hosting company that can handle these types of threats and keep your business website accessible no matter what happens. This means you need to do your research about the hosting company’s server infrastructure, location, backup policies and security protocol. You want a company that has a plan for different worst-case scenarios so the day disaster strikes your business is covered. You also need a company that will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including on holidays in the event of a situation. Does the company have a phone number where you can speak with someone quickly? Being able to contact someone inside the company in a hurry can be critical to addressing serious problems with your website before too much damage is done.
You also need a web hosting company that is not going to bleed your company dry. Some services sound cheap up front, with monthly hosting fees as little as three dollars. While such a low price might seem tempting to a business that is trying to keep costs down, going with these hosting companies that are inexpensive can actually lead to quite a few hidden fees. Some of these companies charge for accessing a backup of a website, including charging quite a bit for each and every backup retrieved. Other services charge a number of administrative fees, which quickly add up and make the good deal not so good anymore.
Gavin Carter is a webmaster. He frequently shares his tips for managing websites better on small business blogs.