Every website has a home on the internet. When it comes to selecting a host, you might think the decision isn’t that important. The wrong strategy, on the other hand, can have a significant negative impact on your company. Bounce rates can increase, and sales can be lost due to bad results and slow page loading times.
The good news is that you can prevent such possible traps with the right strategy. Having the company’s website up and running as smoothly as possible means that your clients are satisfied and that conversions are not interrupted. To put it another way, it’s critical to maintaining a consistent revenue stream.
Why Choose Premium Web Hosting?
Monitoring and protection
According to a widely cited report by Sophos Defense, 30,000 websites are hacked every
day. Every single day! It’s much worse now than it was in 2013. “Why would a hacker be interested in my company’s website?” you may ask. That’s exactly what I was saying. Hackers aren’t interested in your web. Hacking is something they’re interested in. They set up advanced, automated search systems to locate any flaw on any website and exploit it to damage or kill it.
A premium hosting service would have robust firewalls and built-in server-side security to avoid attacks and security breaches. It should have proactive security monitoring, scans the web continuously for bugs and threats and additional security layers and firewalls. It should also have a list of plugins that aren’t enabled and warn you if something becomes potentially vulnerable.
It should be able to deactivate vulnerable plugins for you to secure your site if there is an immediate danger or you do not respond promptly. Someone will notice whether the site is hacked, or something goes wrong, and they will fix it.
Better Business by Better Performance
Content delivery networks (CDNs), massive distributed systems of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet that serve the website content to users with high availability and speed, have been built by several premium web hosting services to make sites load faster.
This is necessary for attracting and retaining tourists. It’s also beneficial to SEO and the industry—the speed at which a website load is considered an essential factor in how Google rates web pages.
According to Kiss metrics, people leave websites that take longer than two seconds to load. A one-second delay in page loading decreases conversions by 7%, page visits by 11%, and user satisfaction by 11%, according to webperformance.com. According to Paessler, using a CDN for website assets will reduce asset load times by up to 50%. The cost of a premium hosting service could quickly pay for itself with these estimates.
Backup and restore with a single click
Your website must be backed up regularly. It’s also essential that it’s simple to restore. Regular backups are ordinarily automatic and saved for at least 30 days with premium hosting services. Even better, some provide a “click to backup” function that you can use to save items right before making updates or improvements to the site, as well as a “click to restore” feature if you need to go back to the saved backup.
Backup and restore are available via off-the-shelf hosting services and plugins, but the process can be complicated and time-consuming. It’s important to note that hacking isn’t the only cause of website downtime. Internal bugs can also cause sites to crash, and you don’t want to waste hours trying to find out what went wrong and how to fix it. You need to get the site back up and running right away. The ability to get your site back up in a matter of seconds will save your life (or at least a sanity-saver).
Testing and Updates on Staging Servers
A staging server is a godsend and alone is worth the few extra dollars per month for premium hosting. A staging server allows you to copy your site to a different server to upgrade plugins and themes, make site improvements, and build while testing it in a stable offline environment. When you’re done, simply click to make the changes live.
Changes to the CMS, plugins, and themes are performed automatically
Failure to update the CMS, themes, and plugins is one of the most prevalent causes of website downtime. The problem arises in part because each of these bodies is organized differently and updates on different timetables.
A premium hosting service will notify you of upcoming updates and automate the process, ensuring that your theme and plugins are still up to date. Some may be set up to evaluate the update and then deploy it if it appears to pass without errors. Themes and plugins usually are set up in the same way. Some experts advise running significant updates on a staging server to test them in a non-live environment.
Customer Support
This alone may be worth the cost of a premium hosting service—the opportunity to quickly contact a live person who can assist you if you have a problem. We never got a live person from the hosting service when the website where I worked was destroyed.
When it comes to open-source content management systems, this is particularly true. If you’ve ever wasted hours searching through user forums for an answer to a question, you understand how valuable live, competent help can be. Instead of depending on a network of good Samaritans, you can call and get it done yourself.
Verdict
The majority of businesses do not consider hosting until something goes wrong. It’s then that you remember you’re usually paying for a bare-bones service with limited protection and efficiency options. Downtime can easily result in missed sales, dissatisfied customers, and a tarnished brand, as websites have become more central to most business operations. Premium web hosting is an investment in business continuity and brand security that, in most cases, is not prohibitively costly.