Reliable WordPress hosting is a major step in how your website is delivered to a customer. Clients should be able to access your website at any given time.
It’s great that you have a good site design that communicates a clear message to your customers. If, however, this message isn’t delivered within the 15 seconds that you have to grab users’ attention then you’ve lost out on potential revenue. (More about that here). Remember that the main goal of your website, whether a brochure- or e-commerce site, is to maximise profits.
What happens when you have non-reliable web hosting?
Negative effect on SEO
Apart from the obvious problem of customers not being able to visit your website, repeated downtime will have a negative effect on your Search Engine Optimisation. Frequent downtime increases your bounce rate and prevents search engine spiders from crawling your site for the necessary information to rank your page.
Security and Malware Attacks
When hosting with an unreliable host, your website runs a high risk of malware attacks and is more likely to have security issues. This can result in many problems such as the theft of sensitive information and loss of files. A good host should handle critical security updates on your CMS, besides proactively blocking unpatched vulnerabilities to prevent the site from being hacked.
Loading speed of the website
WordPress is the biggest developing Content Management Platform currently available but is notoriously slow. Read more here. Web hosting is the biggest player in the page speed of a WordPress site due to the excessive scripts and files that need to be loaded. Sucky web hosting will usually have poor quality hardware, outdated versions of PHP, and limited resources (memory). Together, these affect the speed at which your site loads. There are few things that send potential clients looking elsewhere as much as a slow website.
Loss of files
A good quality hosting supplier will make and keep regular backups of your website database and ftp files. This makes it easy to revert to a previous version of a site in case of:
- a malware attack on your site,
- a corrupt file in outdated plugins, or
- a coding error that breaks your site while updating files.
Losing your site, it’s information and database is the worst-case scenario and should be avoided at all cost. It’s important to know not only that your hosting provider makes backups, but also that they are a well-established host and will be around for a long time.
Inferior Support
This is an important factor in choosing a web host because at some point you will need support from your service provider. Cheaper hosts often have long waiting periods when phoning call centres as well as inexperienced and unqualified technical staff. Small companies often do not have the staff numbers to back this and can leave you high and dry for days on end. Don’t settle for anything less than 24/7 support when choosing a hosting company.
Shared hosting: Should I or shouldn’t I?
In short, no. When considering the issue in-depth, still not. Hosting is not expensive enough to compromise the quality of your user experience. The biggest issue to consider with shared servers are the security risks that are associated with an insecure hosting neighbourhood. Remember that hosting companies do not censor the content on their servers and can unknowingly service spammers. An insecure website can open portholes into your own site’s backend and database.
At Catchatiger we have a dedicated server with HETZNER which hosts only sites that we have personally developed.