Web Hosting Benefits For Businesses
If you want to have a website online, you need web hosting. Without web hosting, your visitors have no way to actually get to your site.
No matter what sector your business falls into, having a professional web hosting solution is essential for a strong online presence.
Here are some of the key web hosting benefits that only professional platforms can provide to businesses.
What Is Web Hosting?
Web hosting refers to an online service through which you can make your website or application accessible on the World Wide Web. Web hosting is offered by web hosts that configure, maintain, and run servers (physical computers) that store all data and files of your website or application. Therefore, purchasing a web hosting plan means you’re renting its server space. When choosing a web hosting service, key factors you need to consider include performance, speed, security, cost, add-ons, and support.
Types of Web Hosting
The extent of web hosting benefits largely depends on what type of web hosting you want to go with. Though you can get a large number of options, the following types of web hosting usually dominate the market.
Ideal for small websites, shared hosting gives you a simple, cost-effective hosting solution. Here, a single server typically hosts many websites, all of which utilize the same server resources. The main downsides of shared hosting are unstable website performance and vulnerability to security issues. When it comes to easy management of the hosting account, cPanel shared hosting has emerged as the best option.
2. VPS hosting
Though in VPS (virtual private server) hosting, a single server hosts multiple accounts, each account receives separately allocated resources. So, you get a stable site performance together with high customizability and security. By choosing one of the best SSD VPS services, you can easily ensure improved website loading speed, durability, and efficiency.
3. Dedicated hosting
If you want to gain supreme control over the hosting environment coupled with expert support from the web host, simply rent one of the cheap managed dedicated servers from a dedicated hosting service provider. Just remember that dedicated hosting is significantly more expensive and ideal for large-scale websites.
4. Cloud hosting
Unlike traditional hosting, a single physical server doesn’t host websites or applications in cloud hosting. Instead, they’re hosted on a network of connected cloud servers. Therefore, you get better flexibility, scalability, and reliability than traditional hosting solutions. One major downside of cloud hosting is its high cost. Often, the costs are even higher than some of the best SSD VPS hosting services.
5. Reseller hosting
As the name implies, reseller hosting lets you sell web hosting services. You don’t need to think about maintaining the hosting software or hardware as reputable web hosts take care of everything by themselves. Remember that with reseller hosting, you’re responsible for managing the typical features of web hosting for your customers, and hence, it’s best to choose cPanel reseller hosting as cPanel has the most user-friendly interface.
Top 10 Key Web Hosting Benefits for Businesses
Whatever be your hosting plan, there are multiple web hosting benefits your business can reap. If you’re still debating the need for web hosting services, know that not choosing the proper web host will increase the risk of your site loading slowly, or worse – not loading at all! This will make you lose out on business as potential customers will be unable to access your site, browse, and place their orders. Additionally, it’ll ruin your chances of ranking highly on the SERPs (search engine results pages) due to poor user experience. To avoid these risks, you should choose a web host that’s reliable, professional, and offers high-quality services. Even when you’re a small business owner, web hosting benefits for small businesses make choosing a web host worth the investment.
If you feel interested in getting a web host for your business but still need some reasons to go ahead, here are the top ten web hosting benefits a rock-solid hosting provider will offer for your business website:
1. Improved Performance of Your Site
Your business’s success online depends a lot on how well your website performs. Remember – you just have a few seconds to grab your visitor’s attention. If your site loads slow and has lags and glitches, your visitors won’t have the patience to stick around. They’ll abandon your site fast, perhaps never to return. And since your search rankings depend heavily on your site’s performance and user experience, faring poorly in these metrics will mean failure to rank higher up in the SERPs. However, you can steer clear of these situations by investing in a high-quality web hosting provider.
One of the top web hosting benefits is having faster loading speeds. Sometimes, poor site optimization can cause slow loading speeds, despite having a high-performing web host. Such issues can be fixed quickly with proper site optimization. Thus, with a reliable web host, you’ll enjoy incredibly fast-loading speeds to attract and retain visitors, who can eventually become your customers.
2. Domain-Specific Email Address
Gmail, Yahoo, or Rediff emails are okay for personal use, but they don’t cut it when it comes to business. To look professional, you need to have a domain-specific email address. For example, if your domain is “eliteservermanagement.com,” then you’ll want an email address that says “[email protected]” or [email protected].
When you’re reaching out to business partners, existing customers, or potential clients via email, your regular Gmail or Yahoo address is the last thing you should use to avoid looking amateur. When you use a professional web hosting service provider, you’ll be able to create your own domain-specific email address. Depending on your chosen hosting plan, you may have the provision to create just one or multiple (and even unlimited) domain-specific email addresses. Using these addresses in your business communication will make you look professional and credible. Since most hosts also have multiple integrated email management tools on offer, you can send, receive, and check emails, along with setting up email forwarders. This is among notable web hosting benefits as these features and tools let you efficiently manage your business emails.
3. Technical Assistance
Lags and glitches are inevitable parts of the modern digital world. If your website provides products or services, being accessible 24/7 backed by helpful and timely customer support is crucial. When you don’t have the technical skills yourself, relying on your hosting provider’s technical team is the next best thing you can do.
Just imagine when you’re in the middle of a big launch or special online event, and your website suddenly shows lags, crashes, or goes offline mysteriously. Every single moment that this continues, you’re losing sales. Additionally, you’re in an embarrassing situation, and your market reputation is at stake. In such situations, you can fall back upon your hosting provider’s support staff, who’ll fix the technical glitches to bring your website back online as fast as possible. Having such technical support from experts is among the leading web hosting benefits for businesses.
4. Enhanced Website Security
This is among the top web hosting benefits. Though it’s almost impossible to have a 100% secure website, you need to strengthen your site’s security. Since you can’t know or predict where the next threat will be coming from, it pays to be prepared to face online threats and malicious elements. The basis of your website’s security starts with your web hosting service provider. Since you’ll store all your website’s files and data with your web host, it needs to have robust and multiple levels of security in place. Quality hosts have these security measures and conduct regular security audits to find loopholes and act proactively to fix security vulnerabilities.
Most reliable web hosts protect their physical datacenters. Additionally, they have necessary firewall protection on the servers and adequate security measures to protect your website from other sites on the same server. Thus, these hosting service providers take multiple measures to secure your site. They also let you strengthen your site’s security by installing anti-spam software and security plugins, locking down your login screen, and modifying user permissions, among others. Since most reliable web hosts also have website backups, you can use them to restore your site to its previous version using the last saved backup in case it’s been hacked or you have accidentally edited your core files. This will save precious time and effort as you won’t need to troubleshoot every little thing in case online attacks or inadvertent mistakes happen.
5. High Uptime and Trustworthiness
Your website’s uptime refers to how often your site was accessible to users who wished to access it. Though you may want it to be accessible all the time, most web hosts specify a certain percentage of time in the hosting contract that your site will be online. For a majority, this number is kept at 99.9%. For 0.1% of the time, when your site is offline, it’s due to tasks carried out by the hosting service provider like server updates, repairs, and maintenance.
When you select a web host for its remarkable uptime, you’ll need to ensure that its claim of providing high uptime is valid. Their uptime guarantee on the “terms and conditions” page and their user reviews about downtime will tell you a lot if you’re observant. With some web hosts, you’ll even get a provision to claim payment credits for any time your website was offline outside of the provided guarantee.
6. Freedom in Web Design and Templates
Do you want to join the league of countless websites that use the same design and template and don’t appear to be professional enough? If your answer is a big “NO,” choosing a reputable web host will be your best bet. In fact, the absence of any restrictions on the usage of templates and designs is one of the top web hosting benefits.
You can design the website the way you want and utilize relevant technologies to make it look more professional. You can also experiment with different templates before finalizing the one that best aligns with your brand’s vision and mission.
7. Efficient Data Management
Effective content management is one of the key factors behind the huge popularity of some websites. Without appropriate, high-value content, it’s simply impossible to attract visitors and convert them into leads. With the right web hosting plan, you can easily add as many pages as you want to your site to bolster your online presence.
Moreover, some top-tier web hosts offer one-click installation for popular CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., which’s among major web hosting benefits for businesses. With the help of a CMS, you can effortlessly manage various digital assets, including text, images, videos, and other types of media, according to your business needs.
8. Unlimited Bandwidth
The ability to choose a hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth is one of the key web hosting benefits for small businesses. Such a plan helps small business owners cater to the needs of unlimited visitors without having to worry about data limits.
It’s also important to note that with unlimited bandwidth, you can serve different types of content to your visitors. For instance, videos require maximum bandwidth, following images and text. This means whether you choose cPanel shared hosting, one of the best SSD VPS hosting solutions, or rent one of the cheap managed dedicated servers, you can use any type of content on your site if the plan offers unlimited bandwidth.
9. SEO Benefits
In today’s highly-competitive business landscape, your company has to maintain a robust digital prominence to outshine the competitors. And for that, your site must acquire high SERP rankings, capturing the attention of online searchers.
By choosing a leading web host and the right web hosting solution, you can optimize various on-page SEO factors of your site, including codes, site architecture, etc. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, a good web host can help improve your page load speed, performance stability, and more, all of which bring SEO benefits to your site, either directly or indirectly.
10. Substantial Long-Term Savings
Now you might wonder how long-term saving can be one of the web hosting benefits, especially when you’re partnering with a top web host? It certainly seems to be expensive initially, but in the long run, you’ll enjoy the savings.
When you choose a free or low-cost web host, you’ll have to manage lots of things on your own, from administrative tasks to security aspects. And as these require solid technical expertise and a significant amount of time, you’ll most likely hire one or two professionals to manage these jobs. But a leading web host will take care of all these things automatically, which’s why significant savings in the long run is one of the key web hosting benefits for businesses.
Final Thoughts
Apart from these key web hosting benefits, you’ll get to enjoy greater flexibility with your site’s web design and templates. Additionally, you’ll have complete control over your content, be it choosing how and when to post blogs, the number of ads your site will display, etc. If your site is steadily growing or has a lot of traffic already, you can even choose unlimited bandwidth, premium DNS, or dedicated servers under your web hosting plan to ensure your site remains accessible, secure, and loads fast.
You’ll probably understand all these web hosting benefits better once you select a high-quality hosting provider and start using its services. Ideally, you should choose a hosting provider that has adequate plans to meet your present business needs and allows the room and flexibility to upgrade or switch packages later on, should your requirements change.
