Your hosting provider plays a key part in the success of your website. If you imagine your website as the ‘building’ of your shop, the host is the foundation upon which it sits. If the hosting provider isn’t up to scratch, your building will fall down.
GoDaddy and other mainstream hosting providers invest millions in advertising their hosting services to business owners. But just because they’re on TV, it doesn’t mean they offer a good service.
We’re going to look at whether mainstream hosting providers are really what they seem and how a poor hosting provider can impact your business.
The reality
The reality of using a big-name hosting provider is that they have big marketing budgets and run massive campaigns across TV, internet and radio. However, in many cases, their service delivery falls short of their promises.
For many mainstream hosting providers, it’s a numbers game – their business model seems to be delivering the minimum level of service to the maximum number of customers. Sadly, customers don’t get the level of service they’re paying for, which can have repercussions on the performance of their website.
What’s the impact of a poor hosting service?
Slow loading speeds
Bounce rates increase for every second that passes beyond two seconds. Your visitors don’t want to wait around, and your conversions will suffer as a result. In short, you can’t afford to compromise on your website loading speed.
We won’t get too technical on you here, but a hosting provider needs to use the right infrastructure behind the scenes to enable your site pages to load quickly. We advise an NVMe storage system and caching, which can increase loading speeds by an impressive 220%.
Poor security
“It won’t happen to me” is a risky website security approach that harms businesses every year. The Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021 found that nearly 40% of businesses were victims of a cyber security breach in the previous 12 months. A hosting provider should use built-in security systems and malware detection to keep your site safe from attack.
Website downtime
Downtime is when your website is unavailable to users or doesn’t perform well enough to do its job. There are numerous reasons why a website might go down, including cyberattacks, server issues, coding errors or database mismanagement. A good hosting provider should manage all of these risks to keep your site live for over 99% of the time (industry best practice is less than 0.6% downtime).
Risk of losing content
Regular backups of your website allow you to recover content if it’s lost for any reason, such as human error, malware or corruption. Whilst you can manually back up your website, a hosting provider should offer automatic backups, too (some don’t). Automatic backups can be scheduled to run at set intervals. We advise using a hosting provider that performs hourly backups, particularly for high-traffic sites in the retail and hospitality industries.
It’s up to the hosting provider how often they back up your site – or whether they do at all. Some hosting providers offer no backup services, although, rather worryingly, they don’t make this immediately obvious to their customers.
Problems with scalability
Your website will attract more traffic as your business grows, placing a higher demand on your host. A good website hosting provider can adapt their service behind the scenes to maintain fast speeds and peak performance to support you as you scale.
Lack of customer support
A poor hosting provider is likely to have a lot of unhappy customers who need help. However, some mainstream hosting providers offer a level of customer service that is, at best, unhelpful, and in some cases, completely unacceptable. Customers who encounter a problem quickly find that attempting to resolve it is frustrating and time-consuming. Online instructions are confusing and send you round in circles, and it can be difficult to get through to someone on the support team.
When it comes to mainstream hosting providers, don’t be fooled by a big marketing budget. In reality, many of these providers offer a below-par service that negatively impacts your website and business.
At Zesty Digital, we hate to see businesses spend time and resources dealing with a bad website host. We provide high-performing, fast, reliable hosting to keep your website performing at its best, all of the time.
Get in touch to find out more about hosting, website maintenance and ongoing support.
