If you are running an online business, it’s essential to make sure you have a solid foundation for operations. This means all aspects of the online business from the storefront to hosting need to be in ship-shape.
I have noticed a lot of people don’t consider the business hosting requirements from the start. But with time, they realize unoptimized hosting hinders their business operations. Smart merchants take immediate action to remedy this issue and move their store to the right hosting provider.
If you are in the process of selecting a hosting provider for your website and want to know how it influences your online business, you are in the right place. In this article, I will show you why hosting is important for an online business and what kind of hosting can help you improve your business growth.
Why You Need to Pay Attention to Web Hosting
Whether you are an individual or multi-team business, website hosting is crucial for the business. If you don’t consider a good hosting solution from the start, you will see dissatisfied customers and a low conversion rate.
Let’s explore the impact of choosing the wrong web host and see how it disrupts the site’s growth and revenue.
Loss of Revenue
The wrong web hosting solution directly impacts your conversion rate and business revenue. The frequent server downtimes result in the loss of traffic and potential buyers. When the visitors are not able to open your landing pages, they turn to your competitor and you lose a sale.
Therefore, it is vital to choose a reliable hosting that will help you minimize server downtime and keep your store accessible to all.
SEO Impact
In addition to server downtime, slow site speed also affects business growth. You will see a high bounce rate with fewer page views, and a gradual drop in SERP rankings if your site is slow to load.
Security
Due to poor security, your site can be hacked at any time. If a hacker trashes your website, you have no way to revert the changes. In such cases, the only recourse you have is the backup you (or the hosting service provider) have.
Random Error
If you see or experience random errors on your website, it directly affects your earnings. To fix these issues, you need expert support assistance (a common feature of all good service providers).
Hosting for Online Business
Before moving further, you need to understand the different types of hosting solutions.
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting, the resources of a single server are shared among multiple users. That’s why it is cheaper when compared to the other two options.
VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The technology behind shared hosting and VPS is the same, but VPS offers higher computing power and a more secure solution. Very often, when a person exceeds the resources of a shared hosting solution, their next choice is VPS hosting. When it comes to pricing, the VPS hosting solution is cheaper than a dedicated hosting solution.
Dedicated Hosting
In this solution, a server belongs to a single website (or a brand), and the resources are not shared with other users. It is a fast hosting solution and you can install multiple applications on your dedicated server. When it comes to pricing, it is a little bit more expensive than other solutions.
Each hosting has a different target audience; shared hosting is popular among beginners, whereas VPS and dedicated hosting is popular among small and medium scale businesses. If you want to see a detailed comparison, this article will help you dig deeper into the difference.
Now you understand the available hosting options, but what if you need an all-in-one hosting solution that is right for all types of businesses and personas? The answer is straightforward! A managed cloud hosting provider (like Cloudways) is the best fit for all types of projects.
Cloudways – a Perfect Hosting
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that allows you to launch dedicated servers on the top five cloud infrastructure providers (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr). It is very popular among WordPress users and is known as the managed WordPress hosting.
Interestingly, it supports almost every PHP application such as Magento, Joomla, Laravel, and many more. So, if you want to run a Magento and WooCommerce store (on the same store), you can easily set up both applications on the same provider and server (not need a separate Magento and WordPress WooCommerce hosting).
It offers budget-friendly plans, with the basic plan starts from $10 (for a 1GB DigitalOcean server).
Features You Need to Look for in a Perfect Hosting
You have numerous options and choosing the right hosting service can be quite a challenge. Considering that, here are the must-have features of the perfect web hosting. To illustrate, I will use Cloudways as an example.
Reliability
Reliability can be defined as server uptime. A reliable hosting provider offers 99% uptime and ensures that your site remains available throughout the year. Cloudways offers 60+ data centers that allow you to host your website at the right location.
Performance
Performance is very crucial for success and it’s important to choose a hosting that offers a performance-oriented stack. Not only this, but it should also offer support for CDN and different cache options that will ultimately help achieve high page test scores.
Cloudways uses LAMP stack with NGINX as a reverse proxy and it is specially designed to improve your site speed. It also offers a native CDN and different caching options including Varnish, Breeze (WordPress cache plugin), and Redis.
As I mentioned earlier, performance can help you improve your SERP ranking and site bounce rate, resulting in increased business growth and revenue.
Security
Security is an essential feature, and the perfect hosting will secure your site at multiple levels. Cloudways offers multiple security firewalls for your server and a bot protection feature for your WordPress applications.
Multiple Application Installations
The perfect hosting will allow you to install multiple applications on a single server. Cloudways does not limit you with the number of installations or page views.
Support
A good hosting provider such as Cloudways provides 24/7/365 support and assistance. As such, if you encounter an issue, a Cloudways support engineer will help you out. Cloudways offers both Live Chat support and ticket support assistance.
Scalability
Your business hosting must have the ability to scale the server resources at any moment. Cloudways offers a vertical scaling feature through which you can scale your server to deal with traffic spikes. With vertical scaling, you can quickly scale server resources to deal with the increased number of visitors and requests.
Final Words
I hope this article helped you understand why an online business needs a perfect hosting solution and why Cloudways is the right hosting for your dream online business.
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