When building a business website, the choices can come at you in a hurry. You have to pick platforms, aesthetics, security options, target audiences and so much more. In the midst of the myriad decisions is one that will have more impact on your website than any other. That choice is your web host provider. Choosing the right provider will lead to an amazing experience and a great website. Choosing the wrong provider will leave you frustrated and floundering.
To really take this idea home, we can zero in on three specific benefits of having a great web host provider: good performance, quality security, and amazing customer support.
Performance
Your web host helps control the performance of your website. They provide the hardware and the logistics of hosting. If they are not up to scratch, your website will not perform well. If they do their job correctly, your website will thrive. It’s that simple.
When browsing web hosts, the decision starts with performance. There are budget options that provide low-cost hosting for small businesses. They also typically have severe speed and bandwidth limitations. There are enterprise hosts that offer incredible power but might not be priced right for many small or medium businesses. Uptime and downtime are also vital to your selection. Any website that sells goods or services is dependent on uptime to stay afloat. If the servers go down, commerce stops, and that can kill any business.
For many of you reading this, your website is your business, and you need a provider that understands and caters to your needs for uptime. Finding the balance is the trick. You want performance that can meet your demands at a price you can afford with the ability to scale up on demand. It’s a lot to ask from a web host, and it should help you weed out inferior providers early in your search.
Security
Ultimately, it is the web host that determines who can and cannot access your website and its backend. It goes without saying that you want a host that can provide top-level security, and it is reasonable to expect any professional host to provide professional security. Still, knowing some of the key differences in hosting systems can help you make an informed decision. For instance, there is a clear distinction between shared hosting and managed hosting. With shared hosting, a lot of websites are on the same server. If one site has a security breach, it can put the whole server at risk. With managed hosting, you are on segregated hosting hardware. That means the security issues of other websites have no impact on you.
This is a major distinction for providers. Flywheel is a well-known managed host, while something like GoDaddy provides shared hosting.
Support
If you are building a WordPress site or an ecommerce site on WordPress and WooCommerce, you want support from WordPress experts. Any host is going to be able to provide some level of support, but a host dedicated only to WordPress is going to have more specialization that can benefit you. Some of the most popular shared hosts provide services to a wide range of websites, many of which are not built on WordPress.
When you choose a WordPress-specific host, like WP Engine, expertise is not spread thin across varying platforms. All of your support is deeply rooted in WordPress, and that allows your help to quickly and easily cut to the root of any problems.
With so much experience in ecommerce, we can easily recommend Flywheel and WP Engine as some of the best hosts on the market. Feel free to check them out, but if you would like an in-depth conversation about what each provider can do for you, contact us. We’ll be happy to help.
It’s not uncommon to be a little skeptical of switching to a managed WordPress host and paying a little bit extra. Contact us today to learn what managed WordPress hosting is and how it’s different from shared hosts!
