Are you hosting your website with a free hosting service provider? Has the quality of service offered by your low-cost hosting provider gone down of late? Is your website suffering due to mistakes at the hosting provider’s end?
If you answered in the affirmative to even one of those questions, it’s time you considered moving your website to a premium hosting server. Many business owners tend to treat the choice of a hosting service as an afterthought. For a business that operates entirely offline, this might not be much of an issue. However, if your business derives its revenues through its website or gets a majority of its leads online, the importance of a good hosting service cannot be overstated. Here are five benefits your website enjoys by switching to a premium hosting seller.
Security & Monitoring
A study by Sophos Security stated that more than 30,000 websites fall prey to hackers daily. The fun bit about that statistic is that it’s from 2013. A full five years later, it’s safe to assume that the number of websites being hacked daily would have most certainly doubled. Most hackers tend to use automated and sophisticated search programs that scan your website for vulnerabilities. If the program finds one, it can be used to bring your website down.
With a premium hosting service, this can be prevented to a great extent thanks to the presence of inbuilt security features and strong firewalls. The provider further offers continuous scanning and monitoring services that preempt attacks. So even if something does go wrong with your website, someone is already doing what it takes to get things back to normal.
Higher Performance = Better Business
Most premium hosting providers serve your website content to users at a high speed and availability. They do this by implementing advanced caching technology, massively distributed server systems that are housed in several data centers and comprehensive content delivery networks (CDN).
This helps attract and retain visitors while also benefiting the SEO of your website. It’s well-known that loading speed is a critical metric when Google ranks your website. Stats also prove that having a CDN for your website assets can reduce load times by half.
Hassle-Free Backup & Restore
While a daily backup of your site is desirable, it’s also important that the restoring process is simple. Premium hosting services offer automated and daily backups while also saving them for a minimum of 30 days. Some providers go a step further and offer a ‘single click backup’ option that can be used to create a backup prior to making any changes or pushing updates to your site. Restoring too is simple with a ‘click to restore’ option.
Although it’s true that most half-decent business hosting providers do include plugin-based backup and restore, their restoring process tends to be time-consuming and complex. Regardless of whether your website is down because of external or internal factors, the priority is to get the site back to normal as soon as possible. A simple restoring process is invaluable in such a scenario.
Staging Servers
Staging servers are immensely useful and on their own are worth the extra cost you pay for a premium hosting server. As denoted by its name, you can use this server to create and run a copy of your site and perform all sorts of safe testing on it. Other things you can do using a staging server include making website changes, updating themes and plugins and doing development work. Once you are done with all changes, you can make them live with a single click.
Customer Service
This one factor alone is worth the asking price of premium hosting providers. Remember, such providers, offer you live assistance from a real person almost instantly. In case of problems, you can communicate with the support personnel without any delays. With lower priced hosting providers, it’s likely that if and when your website does encounter problems, you will be left stranded.
A good example can be found in the forums of open source content management systems. Just look at the number of people on these boards trying to find answers to their problems. Now put yourself in their place and think how wonderful it would be to have instantaneous and professional support. Why rely on a Samaritan helping you when you can simply pay a professional for their service!
Most businesses tend to play down the importance of their websites’ hosting unless and until something goes seriously wrong. The realization that all along they were paying for a mediocre service that offered minimal performance and security features dawns rather late.
However, it’s never too late to make amends. Switching to a premium provider is quite easy in this day and age. More importantly, doing so has the potential to boost your business by many times over.