Web hosting is a critical part of every website and application. You might have the best idea, pull the best team to put it all together, but if you choose the wrong web hosting company, you’re set for colossal failure.
Don’t believe me? Well, read on and see for yourself. This article will show you how much of a deep hole you’ll be placing yourself when you choose your web host wrongly and what to do to avoid that.
Danger 1: Your Website Will Be Slower Than An Edge Network
Do you like how quickly Google loads? Do you love how fast The Brand Ally’s website loads?
Oh Well, there are many factors responsible for website speed and optimizing a website to be fast, but if your web hosting company is terrible, no matter how much you optimize, your website will go nowhere.
Danger 1.1: Bounce Time Will Be High
Bounce time is how fast visitors leave your website. The more time people spend on your website, the more your trust level increases in Google’s sight.
No one wants to wait for ages for a website to load, and tons of other sites will give your visitors similar or the same services. You have got to be on your toes.
Danger 1.2: Your Ranking Reduces
Google has over 200 ranking factors, but they have indicated that website speed is one factor that they take seriously for ranking. It measures time to first byte – that is, the time between when your visitor requests the website until the first byte (of the content on your website) is served.
Also, slow pages mean the bot will crawl fewer pages on your website, thus affecting how many pages are indexed.
Google also LOVES good user experience. If they see that your bounce rate is high, it means your experience level is terrible so they’ll rank you lower than those with better speed.
Danger 2: Your Security Level Will Be Bad
A shabby web hosting company will not bother much with security. Your chances of getting malware, virus, and all sorts of bad stuff is very high. What about your hosting account being hacked and malicious content published on your website? – very, very high.
It gets even worse if you choose a bad web development company or you don’t know what you’re doing and choose to still go ahead with designing your website on maybe WordPress, thinking that it doesn’t matter.
Guess what? Many WordPress themes and plugins have compatibility and security issues. WordPress is one of the most popular CMS to be hacked. If you do it right and choose the right tools though, you’ll enjoy the CMS even better than your best food.
Danger 2.2: Your Website Will Be Home To Spammers
Email and website spam are two very annoying things. Unfortunately, they still come. The best web hosting companies have anti-spam in place and other reliable tools for email security. They also provide security against website spam and virus to an extent; one that you don’t need to build much on.
Danger 3: Your Revenue Will Go Down
Research has shown that for every one-second increase in load time, you’re losing 7% of your conversions. Your potential customers will not be able to see your blog post, service pages, or products before they get frustrated with you.
E-commerce businesses get it worse because the entire transaction is going on online.
Danger 4: On Most Days, Your Website Goes Dark
Uptime is very important. Don’t listen to all those companies saying 100% guarantee, especially if they don’t have an SLA. Hosting isn’t perfect, but you need a web host that you can get at least 99.9% uptime in a given year.
Anything lower means you’ll be struggling with downtimes. It gets even worse for web hosts that deliver much much lower than that.
Check online forums like webhostingtalks; you’ll see laments of people having more downtime than uptime. It’s like having your office only open for three hours instead of eight. Do you know how much business you’ll lose?
Danger 5: Your Website Or Domain Gets Stolen
This concerns not only web hosting providers but also domain registrars. A friend once bought a domain from – a registrar who must not be named. Most people know them though. I have heard of horror stories from this one and advised the friend not to go forward.
He did anyway and paid for one year. A few months later, he decided to use his domain but guess what, the registrar had stolen it. WHOis showed the owner as the domain company. There was nothing he could do but lament and gnash his teeth.
Don’t be like my very real friend. Choose the right web host and domain registrar.
Danger 6: Your Website Could Disappear At Any Time
If your bad hosting provider gets in trouble, they’ll shut down without warning you about it. Usually, when hosting companies are liquidating, they send emails to all customers and give them months to move to another provider with refunds on remaining credits.
Not the bad guys though. That means, all the backlinks you built are now useless. All the marketing you’ve done, sweat you have made, SEO efforts, everything goes down the drain.
Danger 7: Moving To Another Provider Becomes A Nightmare
Many bad web hosting sites know that they are bad. They know it, and they love to deceive people into paying for their “cheap” services. They also put some insurance to prevent their customers from leaving. Some, not all.
They make the migration process a complicated load of bullshit. You can’t move out easily, and they do that in hopes that you’ll become frustrated and decide to stick with them.
What To Do If Your Web Host Is Terrible
Find The Fault:
The first thing to do is determine if your problems are actually from your web host or your website. Even with a great web host, you still need to work on optimizing your website.
Look For Great Providers
There are many factors to check before choosing a web hosting company. Check our post on factors to consider before choosing a web host. Also, you need to check actual customer reviews. Yelp and webhostingtalks are two places that you’re more likely to get the truth. Also, if your new provider offers free migration, that’s great.
Run Faster than You Have Ever
Take your website out of there as fast as you can. Move, move, move.
How To Choose A Web Hosting Service
Choosing the right hosting company is about knowing what to look out for. Some companies are still living in the 90s and offer features that would have been great then but are too old for us now.
The first step is knowing the features to look out for before you buy hosting. We’ll be tackling that with the exact features you should look out for and other web hosting tips in a blog post in the coming months.
If you want to be the first to know when we post the blog, subscribe to receive notifications in your email.
Tell us your stories in the comments. Also, you can send us an email with the woes you currently are facing, and we’ll help you sort it out.
Till next time.
Cheers!
