- Hosting your website on a fast server is key critical for speed but what does that look like in the real world? If the website that you’ve worked hard to have created has been hosted on a cheap platform (GoDaddy as an example) or a host that, claims they’re great and they’re super cheap, could be devastating in the long run for performance speed vulnerabilities. It simply won’t have the available bandwidth for your website to be found quickly, once a visitor clicks on your website link. But why else is it so critical to your website? A fast server is the foundation of your website and is, therefore, the foundation for your business. All your website traffic – all your marketing efforts, SEO, social media, any digital marketing, curated copywriting content – all of that does not matter if you have terrible hosting, because all these do is point back to your website and if your website is slow, people won’t hang around. The adage “buy cheap, pay twice” is one to remember when thinking about your hosting and how important it is to your business development.
Questions to ask your web developer/hosting company are based on whether you have a standard hosting package or one that is an e-commerce site. If yours is a standard package – ask if the cost includes any additional items (an HTTPS certificate as an example) and what the additional costs are for these to be added on. It can add up!
If you have an e-commerce package – these require more storage/resources from a server and should be dedicated for the specific type of website you have. As an example, our enhanced hosting is dedicated for WordPress websites, so it’s optimised to perform well for the WordPress platform, which ultimately means the performance will be much more optimised than others.
The other question is how many visitors can my website handle in one go? This is super important on any website, but especially on e-commerce sites. If you have a product launch that you’re expecting to be big, the last thing you want is for the site to fall over or go down.