Web hosting refers to the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more websites.
There are multiple types of hosting that you can opt for. A summary of the different options available is provided below; you can learn more here.
Shared hosting
Several websites are kept on the same server. This hosting is often cheaper, making it the common choice for small business websites and personal blogs. However, the resources are shared between websites, so there is a chance for fewer resources shared to your website, reducing its performance.
Virtual hosting
This is when your website is hosted privately or virtually. This is considered an upgrade from the shared hosting since the resources are still shared with other website owners. Having said that, this helps improve stability and scalability but can have config and control limitations on the site.
Dedicated hosting
This is when the website owner receives exclusive rental rights over a web server. This means that you will have complete control over the environment and can avoid sharing resources with others. This improves privacy, performance, and security. However, it is the most expensive type of web hosting.
Cloud hosting
This is when the website owner gains access to distributed servers instead of renting space from one shared server and one location. This reduces latency issues, increases resource availability, instant scalability, higher uptime, etc. This is a hosting service that became popular recently with the implementation of cloud computing. Often, this hosting service can be found for cheap, if you look in the right places.
Managed hosting
This is when a managed service provider (MSP) provides a hosting plan, infrastructure support, and support with hardware management and maintenance. Managed hosting can be available for cloud hosting, VPS hosting, shared hosting or dedicated on-premises data centers.
The most popular is managed WordPress hosting. WordPress is the most popular content management system and powers more than 1/3rd of the websites. Hence, it can bring in top website performance, high site speed, etc.
What should you consider when choosing a website hosting service?
There are many types of hosting plans and hosting service providers available in the market. You must be careful when selecting the right website hosting service since it can significantly impact your website’s design, performance, maintenance, etc. There are plenty of useful options and reviews about such tools here. Upon the critical comparisons between top hosting service providers in the market and their offerings, you should be able to choose the best hosting service that meets your requirements.
A few things to consider before choosing a hosting plan or hosting service provider are listed below. You can learn more on choosing the right website hosting service here:
- Average uptime
- Load time
- Support
- Pricing
- Domain (most plans offer FREE domains)
- Bandwidth and storage
- SSL certificate
- Refund options
- Backups
- Security
- Extra features (i.e., cPanel, one-click WordPress installation, etc.)
The importance of site speed
Site speed is easily one of the most important elements of the website that contribute towards the overall brand experience for the user. A fast and responsive website can improve the user experience, increase page views and conversions, and reduce bounce rate.
According to a survey, if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, approximately 40% of the visitors will abandon the site. This is because the attention span and patience of the users have significantly dropped over the years.
Therefore, if you wish to maintain low bounce rates and high engagement/conversion rates, it is important to maintain a fast website. You can test the site speed of your website here before launching the website on the market.
In addition to that, Google uses site speed as a ranking factor in search engine results. If your site is slow and takes more than 3 seconds to load all elements, it may never show up on the online search resulting in zero customers or poor conversions and engagement.
How does the choice of web hosting affect the site speed?
The site speed is influenced drastically by the choice of web hosting plan/provider. There are two main features that you need to consider in determining which option provides better site speed and performance:
Hard drive
The SSD will offer a much faster and reliable service than the standard HDD. Even better, going with an SSD NVMe hosting can deliver twenty times faster speed compared to conventional solid state drive hosting. You need to figure out what your hosting provider/plan offers since this can significantly influence site speed and performance.
Resources
The more RAM and bandwidth that your hosting provider/plan provides automatically add speed and power to your website. Therefore, opting for dedicated or virtual hosting improves site speed and performance as it offers more resources than the shared hosting server and prevents other sites from stealing resources which can negatively impact your site speed and performance.
How does it affect your marketing strategy?
The bottom line or objective of any marketing strategy is to provide an excellent brand and user experience to the customer to drive conversion, retention, and engagement. The site speed is a key contributor to the user experience.
Therefore, a slow site can negatively influence your customer. As a result, your marketing strategy can fail since you were not able to provide an excellent and satisfying user experience on the site, leading to users switching to competitors and abandoning your site.
Businesses can implement a strong UI/UX design for their website that maximizes the appeal and performance to improve the success rate of their marketing strategy.
However, this can only be successfully provided if the right hosting plan and service provider are chosen. A poor choice can lead to poor performance, poor conversions, poor engagement, high bounce rate, and cost of switching (if you wish to switch after purchasing the hosting plan, you will need to purchase a new subscription and completely forgo the initial investment on the hosting plan. This is why the refund policy is beneficial).
Note: Paul Aroloye helps 10x businesses by connecting them with the right targeted audiences boosting their sales and return on investment.