What is a web host?

A web host is a company or individual that allows you to use their servers in order to keep your website live and operational.

What is the benefit of having a web host?

Having a web host keep your website live will allow you to build and show your customers an online marketing platform that will bring in additional sales and profits due to having a larger target audience. This could be true for any site that has a website designed and needs to keep it live, such as Facebook.

Why is it important to have a good web host?

There are plenty of web hosting companies out there with varying levels of sophistication and qualities of service as well as price – choosing your web host is very important because if they are not good enough or certain things go wrong then it can be extremely detrimental to your business in a number of ways. There are certain things about web hosting that may be of particular interest to you on this blog.

Web hosting from an SEO perspective

SEO (abbreviated from Search Engine Optimization) is the practice and effort of trying to get your website additional notoriety on the internet through search engine results and links from other websites. It is essentially online marketing to bring more customers in and once again increase sales and profits.

The reason why this is relevant from an SEO perspective is because of the fact that the quality of your hosting company can also affect your website traffic as well as how much money you make. Without a good web host you could be losing out on customers or even losing existing ones!

Page Load Speed

This is something that is really irritating for the customer – who wants to wait 5-10 seconds for a page to load, most of the time you want it pretty much instantaneously especially for quick product queries or the consumer may just go to the next page or available company.

It only takes a matter of seconds to decide to move back to another site after a poor page loading, as there is no reason to wait extensive amounts of time and we as internet users are addicted to speed and convenience.

Page Load Speed is also bad from an SEO perspective, as it is one of the parameters in the Google algorithm, and therefore bad hosting = bad website traffic. In other words the user experience is everything, as expanded on in this article

Matt Cutts is the leader of the web spam team at Google and he explains here how and why site speed is implemented into search rankings.

Server crashes/website downtime

From time to time most web hosting companies may have downtime from one of their servers crashing, general lag or anything that could potentially go wrong with a server. This is something that can really only happen once in a blue moon from a customer perspective.

This is because of the fact that website downtime from a server issue is not just relevant to the company that owns the website; it is also a massive impact on customers who use that site.

Having extended website downtime stops your existing customers getting onto your website and using your products, and is also an issue because of the fact that new customers will not be able to find you efficiently either. It is very easy for them to move on to another site.

Once your website has been identified as down or faulty these new customers are unlikely to think of you again and will probably assume that from one instance your website is always down. This is why downtime of a website is so crucial in keeping your customers.

For instance, Facebook see the important of keeping their site live at all times. Facebook hasn’t been down for more than around an hour at a time since the site was launched, because they have their own high-quality servers.