Photo by Charles Deluvio ???? on Unsplash
The very notion of business implies providing services or products, but the age of offering your goods offline appears to have ended. Nowadays, if your business is not represented on the Internet, it is doomed, as most prospective customers are found online.
Whatever the industry you are operating in, your website should feature various kinds of sections and tools that your clients-to-be may need. These usually include either an e-store or descriptions of the products you offer, live chat, blog, banners, and so on. In some cases, having a forum wouldn’t hurt. All these website aspects share the same requirement: it is stability that they need. If your live chat is offline, it is, well, not live. If your forum is down, you will not be able to consult your customers. If your blog experiences downtime, it deters website visitors and makes a horrible impression on them.
All this boils down to one conclusion: in order to function properly, your business website should be up. Yep, Captain Obvious.
However simple it may sound, choosing a company to host your website can turn out to be a challenge. While finding a reliable hosting provider may appear to be within a couple of okay-googles, doing some research is definitely required. You know, in this day and age everyone claims to have extensive experience, reliable servers, and excellent customer support only to turn out to be a company with lots of negative reviews, outsourced staff members (say hello to I-will-escalate-your-issues) and pretty much unimpressive plan features. And yes, there’s the omnipresent “unlimited everything” claim.
That being said, running a website, if it’s just being planned, calls for doing preliminary research: look through websites providing hosting reviews, like Web Hosting Geeks or HostAdvice – actually, there are plenty of them to choose from, so if the one you are browsing seems to overlook paid reviews, search elsewhere. When you are going to buy a car, you are likely to spend hours, if not days and weeks, googling everything about it, so why should hosting be different?
Here is what can happen if you neglect this stage of setting up your business website.
Complication #1. Downtime
The bane of many a cheap hosting solution, downtime is what awaits you if you decide to “save money” and invest in shared hosting that costs a couple of bucks a month. Admittedly there are really affordable hosting services that are worth recommending, but these are only for businesses that are not expected to grow, since the traffic such a website will be able to handle won’t be something to boast about. If you want to avoid downtime, it’s recommended that you opt for something requiring you to spend another couple of dollars on it monthly – no guarantees, though, as high prices do not always mean high quality. Research. Research. Research.
Otherwise your clients-to-be simply won’t be able to contact you, browse your products, or do whatever else your website is supposed to enable them to do.
Complication #2. Not enough features
Your business may also be suffering due to poor hosting choice because of its inability to support the features you may need. For instance, there are hosting services that lack technical solutions enabling you to use the modules you might want to install. From sliders to e-store functions, your business may fall short of the customers’ expectations due to having a website inferior to those of competitors in terms of features. Your competitor’s website is able to filter search results, calculate how many tiles the customer will need, and provide 3D images of products; yours isn’t. Which one prospective clients are more likely to choose?
Complication #3. No escape?
When you have finally made up your mind to switch to some other hosting, you may be surprised by how difficult it is to do it. Migration is not an easy thing by itself, but it is often made tedious by your current hosting provider, because they do not want to lose customers. Some can go as far as to hold your website hostage unless you pay them a certain amount of money. As if it weren’t bold enough, they can also charge you for another couple of years, even if you have requested to cancel your account via the ticket system or contacted their support team some other way. In rare cases, your data can be deleted.
These are not the only problems caused by poor hosting services: failure to ensure data security, abundance of upsells, and other flaws are also among the reasons why choosing a hosting company for your business wisely is a must. Before you venture to enter the world of online sales, make sure you have done research and chosen a hosting provider that offers everything you need to run your website, has received (mostly) positive feedback, and is eager to support their customers whenever such a need may arise.