How a bad web hosting service can negatively impact your online business
The web hosting service is the most important aspect of your online business. Every piece of your website relies on the webshosting: the content saved in the database, the contact informations, products. If the hosting is down, your website is down and your business is 0. A good web hosting can take the stress out of you so you won’t worry any moment if your website is down or if it loads very slow.
Here are 3 ways how web hosting serviec quality can negatively impact your online business:
- Downtime. If the hosting company can’t assure you an uptime of at least 99%, your website will be down often. If your website will be down 3% of time, then you are in big trouble. You may think that 3% is not that much, if you lose 3 conversions out of 100 but you have to pay much less to the hosting company then the profits are higher, right ? Well, it’s not that way. Usually a person needs more steps to make that conversion, so at one step he can get into that 3% of the time when the host is down. You will lose more than 3% in conversions. Looking just at numbers, 3% of an hour is about 2 minutes, 3% of a day is 45 minutes, and 3% of a month means 21 hours, almost a day.
- Slow loading. If your website is loading very slow, a lot of your customers will give up. They will have a hard time to get to that landing page to complete that conversion. They will have to do something else while your website is loading, to open a new window, a new tab that will distract them and fail to convers. If the website is complex and have many elements, it is understable to take a lot of time to load, but the elements will appear as they load, so the user will still be able to view the text immediately and see the images later, but if when you load your website it keeps says “Waiting for website” for several seconds, then the visitor don’t know if the website is broken or it will appear later. Also, google ranking algorithm seems to take into account the website loading speed when raking websites.
- Bad customer support. This is something you may not think about at the begining, but there is a time when you don’t know why something bad is happening and you suspect that there are some problems with the hosting. Fast customer support will help you to resolve the problem so you can get your website up and running again. However, there are hosting companies that prefer to employ people to do the marketing stuff, but they don’t employ people for live support, and the only way to contact them is to open a support ticket that will need 4-5 days to be resolved.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 10th, 2011 at 10:35 am
thanks for the great blog post Lucian. I think Hostgator is a very good option for web hosting.
December 14th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Thank you for your comment. I also have my websites on hostgator.