If you have an online business of any kind, the web hosting is going to play one of the most important roles in determining how successful your eCommerce is, whether you realize it or not. Unfortunately, a lot of smaller businesses do not realize that fact and end up losing sales and even reputation because of either a poor service provider, or by simply choosing the wrong type of web hosting. To understand how the hosting affects the performance of an online business directly and indirectly, go through the following as we try and shed a bit of light on the matter.
Speed of the Website is Dependent on Your Web Server
Depending on how much resources are allocated or made available to your website at any given time by your web service provider, the loading speed of your webpages will vary greatly, which is not good news. According to stats, users on an average are not willing to wait more than roughly three seconds for a webpage to load, which means that each and every time your website takes more than three to five seconds to load, you are losing potential customers.
To further add to the problem, stats also show that once a user experiences lag on a particular webpage, they are likely going to avoid that page in the near future as well, so the damage is long term, as well as short term.
Finally, and most importantly for an online business, Google and other major search engines rank websites in their respective SERPs highly based on how fast they load up after the user clicks the link. Therefore, even if your SEO is on point, a slow website will put you behind others on a search engine result page, which is just about as bad as it can get for an eCommerce website.
To solve this deal breaking issue of slow page loading speeds, you need to first understand why it is happening. The more content, media and traffic a website is associated with, the more resources it requires from the server to remain speedy and fluid. As most business owners are unaware of this little key fact, they continue to use shared hosting with which most small businesses start in general, even after they outgrow such limited resources.
The solution is quite simple and affordable these days for even the tiniest of businesses, which entails switching to a more resourceful and dedicated hosting type.
Now, a dedicated physical server would be the ultimate solution because by choosing that, you are getting the entire resources of an enterprise grade server to tend to all the needs of the website! Unfortunately, that’s both a waste of resources and money for smaller sites because they do not generally need that kind of power and dedicated servers do cost a lot. Then there is the question of maintaining the server as well, which is not an easy task unless you have significant technical knowledge regarding server management.
So, what is the ideal solution for small businesses to speed up their websites without wasting money, time and resources? The answer is VPS, or virtual private servers. A VPS is still a dedicated server that will boost the loading speed of your website instantly, but it costs less and requires less technical maintenance as well.
In a VPS setting, a very limited number of websites share a single server’s resources, but each of the websites have a dedicated amount of the server’s massive resources assigned to it and none of the others on the same physical server can drain on those resources, because each of them act as a completely independent server. Read more on Jaguar PC about virtual private servers, their many features and how they can revolutionize a small business by offering instant speed boosts at affordable prices. In fact, a good web hosting service will even let you upgrade or even downgrade your website’s VPS resources, if and when required.
Marketing and SEO Efforts are Wasted Unless the Site Can Support It
It isn’t easy to do business in this highly competitive online market, irrespective of your niche. Therefore, proper digital marketing and search engine optimization is essential to make sure that your target audience is able to actually find you on the World Wide Web.
Even with an understanding of that fact and adequate implementations of a well-planned marketing strategy, all that effort is likely going to go to waste if the site itself cannot support the boosted traffic. Once again, the resources of the server come into play and if those resources are not sufficient to support the incoming traffic, the website will slow down to a crawl at best and crash completely at worst.
In both scenarios, the site is losing reputation, potential sales, and even the money that was spent on a successful marketing and SEO campaign is ultimately wasted.
Security on Shared Servers is Minimum at Best
If you have a website in 2019, hackers are trying to hack it; it’s as simple as that unfortunately, and when that website is a business site, expect cyberattacks to be directed specifically towards your site on a continual basis.
Sites running on a dedicated server or a VPS are better protected in such an unsafe online environment because they are not sharing the same physical server with hundreds of other websites. A cybercriminal can use the vulnerability in any one of those websites to gain access inside the server through the ill-protected site, which leaves each and every other website potentially vulnerable to attacks from the hacker.
A VPS on the other hand, is separated from all the other websites on the physical server, and the resources allocated to every website on the server act as individual virtual servers, making it nearly impossible for hackers to attack other websites on the server, even if one of the websites is compromised.
Downtime is Extremely Bad for Business
Uptime is the percentage of time within any given period that a website stays online for business. VPS and dedicated servers have the highest uptimes, which means that the website almost always stays open to customers, which naturally increases sales numbers. A poor uptime, on the other hand, is similar to a physical shop staying closed during peak business hours, which is often the situation with free hosting or shared hosting.
Now that a few key points regarding how business is affected by the quality or nature of your web hosting have been established, the whole concept should be easier to understand. In case you are experiencing frequent downtime, crashes and slowdowns, now you know what the problem is and how to improve business.
