January 19, 2023
Every Internet user can understand how inconvenient is downtime, but only businesses feel the real consequences of its cost. During a couple of minutes when your website is unavailable, the company is losing money. However, that is not the only consequence you can expect. Also, downtime influences the SEO ranking, and reputation of your startup, and impacts general productivity.
A great thing is that all these risks can be prevented by choosing a reliable hosting solution. So, here in the article, we will help you with searching for the right hosting service, and in the meantime, you can check Hostzealot.
It is important to specify, the one-time outage is not a huge issue and can occur with any website. The real issues start when it occurs with some regularity and here are some consequences of the downtime:
- Reputation. Regular and what is more problematic – prolonged downtime can lead to serious issues with the lack of trust. This can be extremely painful for startups that are just starting their journey because clients can accept your brand as unreliable.
- Revenue. If you are launching an e-commerce website, then downtime can directly influence the sales rates. When customers cannot immediately access the purchase, then it directly impacts the revenue.
- Costs for the recovery. Once, your website is working again, you might need some resources to restore the damaged/lost information and that is an additional layer of spending.
- Productivity. If you have a huge team or just a couple of employees working on a specific project on the site, then downtime directly influences the productivity of their work. This means the deadlines won’t be met as initially planned.
The choice of the wrong hosting service directly influences the troubles with the downtime. That’s why it is so important to pay attention to the reputation of the web hosting provider as well as to the specific plan you are paying for. Here are a couple of important factors to pay attention to when searching for a reliable hosting service:
The speed with which the webpages are loaded is important not only for the client’s satisfaction but for SEO in general. The bounce rate is more than 90 % in case the loading speed is between 3 and 5 seconds. That means in case your site loads for less than a second it can directly influence its success.
This suggests when you are selecting a hosting provider you should pay attention to RAM and SSD storage of the chosen server. Moreover, you should choose a location that is closer to your target audience and in such a way you exclude the chances of slowdowns or even downtimes.
Another crucial factor is the uptime of the hosting plan you have chosen. This information is usually accessible in the description section of the chosen plan and it is written in the percentage. Select ones that have 99.9 percent of uptime and higher.
The higher the uptime, the higher will be your SEO ranking, because this criterion directly influences online presence.
A hosting service that has good scalability gives users a chance to upgrade/downgrade their plans according to the current demands. In case, you have a sudden spike in the traffic volume, you should have a possibility to upgrade your hosting plan otherwise it will lead to performance degradation or even a prolonged downtime.
When searching for a reliable hosting solution, you should pay attention to security features as well. For instance, it is crucial to check whether a specific plan has SSL encryption. This means your sensitive data will be transmitted through the website without any security risks.
Moreover, pay attention to whether DDoS protection is offered. This will protect your server from various malicious attempts to overwhelm the traffic with suspicious traffic activity. Also, regular server monitoring features and firewalls might be really helpful for the prevention of possible security issues.
One more factor that is usually omitted when talking about the downtime is quick reaction of customer support. To begin with, support should be accessible 24/7 so that any possible troubles will be solved in a matter of minutes. The professionalism and experience of the team also matter a lot when downtime occurs. Quick troubleshooting of technical issues leads to a better reputation for your company and customer satisfaction in general.
The availability of the support can be easily checked just by reviewing the website of the web hosting provider. Moreover, pay attention to the type of support, whether the live chat is available or there is just email assistance. When multiple channels are accessible, you can be 100 percent sure that your problem will be quickly solved.
