Why Unreliable Website Hosting Could Kill Your Business
Reliability isn’t a sexy subject. It’s rarely the top priority when looking for a new car, and it’s unlikely to affect which way you swipe on a dating app. Yet unreliability can be a deal-breaker for all sorts of things. It may even lead to the death of an online business if that company relies heavily on its website for trade. As a result, choosing the right website host partner is one of the biggest decisions a new business owner will make.
Creating Strong Brands
The dependability of your hosting partner matters because a website is often the sum total of your company’s public profile. It’s your storefront, shop floor and cash desk all rolled into one. It simultaneously plays the roles of clerk and cashier, resolving customer queries while helping them to complete their purchases. It’s where people discover your brand and product range, before deciding whether to trust it with their custom. And yet none of this can happen if the site is offline.
At Midphase, we do everything in our power to keep customer sites online. We store multiple copies of your website content in secure locations around the world, on super-fast servers maintained with 24-7 tech support. We combine the latest hardware and super-fast internet connections, delivering data to individual users as quickly as possible. And although we have a dedicated webpage constantly displaying the status of all our hardware, you’ll usually have to trawl through the archives of our Past Incidents log to find any reported issues.
We invest heavily in infrastructure and technical support because we know unreliable website hosting could kill your business:
- Customers quickly migrate elsewhere. Today’s high-speed lives don’t indulge a one-hour wait while a server reboots. Potential customers will effortlessly migrate onto competitor platforms, potentially being lost to the offline website company forever.
- Unreliability affects search engine rankings. Google and Bing notice if a website is down during their regular sweeps for new content. If downtime becomes a regular event, they regard this as low-quality content and rank it as less findable in results.
- Sluggish loading times aren’t acceptable. As broadband speeds rise, we expect sites to display almost instantly. Yet a budget hosting company might cram too many websites onto an overloaded server. Audiences jump ship if pages load too slowly.
- A website shouldn’t go offline mid-transaction. How would you feel if you were halfway through an ecommerce transaction, and the website went down? You probably wouldn’t wait for it to reboot to complete your transaction – or visit it again.
- Unreliable website hosts rarely offer quality service. Things inevitably go wrong with live websites. WordPress plugins stop working, servers require maintenance and antivirus software needs updating. Low-grade hosts won’t provide good support.
- Smaller host companies might go out of business. If a website host has your only copy of web text, images and databases, their sudden disappearance could cause irreparable damage to your brand. This loss of custom may be fatal if you can’t recover quickly.