Website hosting is essential for every live website on the internet. It is one of the main factors that we need to consider. It affects the reputation, performance, and reliability of your site. It impacts the viewing experience for your visitors and regular readers.
To help your website stand-out in the competition in your industry, you must ensure that it is fully accessible any time. It must work properly and not cause any difficulties to your visitors.
Most enterprise business acquire the full services of a web hosting company to provide the best user experience to their valued visitors and to keep them returning to their website. These are some important factors to keep in mind whenever you decide to purchase hosting services for your website.
Website Performance
It is imperative that you know about these important factors:
- Speed load-time of your website –
Having a quick and responsive website can give your visitors a great user experience. People don’t spend a lot of time waiting for a website to display its content if it usually takes time to complete the transmitting of data to the readers. If your website can’t satisfy your visitors in terms of the loading time of your pages, this will give your website negative feedback from your visitors and you can lose the attention of search engines. See How to Speed Up Page Load Times for more details.
- Bad Server Reputation –
Avoid having your website hosted on a server that contains spam pages and undersirable websites. Sharing a server with sites containing adult content, that are gambling related, or offer illegal products will definitely bring down your website performance and reputation in search engines.
Your website may not appear in SERPs or you may find it hard to rank for your targeted keywords because the signal of your website is coming from a server with bad reputation.
- Server downtime –
Server stability plays an important role in website rankings. If your website is frequently updated on a regular basis, your website will be visited often by search engine bots. However, if the hosting server of your website is repeatedly down, this will give your website a negative impression for both search engines and on your visitors.
Keep in mind that server stability is vitally important for websites, especially if your website frequently has visitors driven by social media or social bookmarking websites which have large numbers of users.
- Geo Location –
The location of your hosting server does matter. If your target audience is in a specific country, it is better to purchase hosting from that specific country. Search engines identify your website location through its I.P address.
If you are targeting a particular country, use TLD extensions such as .JP for Japan, co.uk for UK and so on. See the IANA site for a list of TLD extensions by country.
Also, keep in mind you must use the primary language of that country in your website to make it appear dedicated to providing necessary information to its target readers.
It is always necessary to provide the best user experience to your valuable readers:
- Quality content
- User friendly navigation
- Interactivity
- Website performance
- Mobile responsive design so that it displays correctly on mobile phones, tablets, and all other devices.
Although this may seem to be a bit expensive, it is much better to spend a little than to put your business and website reputation at risk.