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It was probably somewhere near the bottom of your list of things-to-do when you first started your affiliate business. Once you’ve come up with an idea for a brand, realised your target market and designed an awesome website to sit along side everything, web hosting seems a bit of an afterthought.
Well that’s not good enough. Web hosting is crucial to the success any online business, in more ways than you may think, and will either limit your potential or quadruple it, depending on what type you choose.
If you’re using a free or cheap (and by cheap we don’t mean affordable, we mean bog-standard) then you really ought to stop and move to a better web hosting. This will of course mean spending a little more money, but the benefits are definitely noticeable.
So now the dust has settled, maybe it’s time to go back and take another look, it could well be worth the effort.
Still not convinced? We’ve put together a few things to consider when determining whether or not your current web hosting is working for you.
Tech-savvy readers should already have an idea of what web hosting is, but incase you’re a little rusty, or you have absolutely no clue whatever, here’s how it works in a nutshell: Your website files are stored on a remote computer server, which is referred to as the host. Every website you’ve ever browsed is hosted on one of these servers.
Now, you should also know that websites have a tendency to go ‘down’ occasionally, where for moments at a time it is inaccessible to online visitors. These moments can last a few seconds or several hours, and is often a result of cheap hosting providers not using enough bandwidth to match the number of viewers.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see how low quality hosting can have an adverse effect on your business. When your website is temporarily down then nobody can get the information you offer or make a purchase. This means losing potential customers and losing revenue, even more so when you’ve invested in paid traffic.
Furthermore a website that is down, especially on a frequent basis, can make your business look unreliable and have a negative impact on your reputation.
The same thing applies to website speed. If your hosting provider is incapable of giving the bandwidth to accommodate traffic, your visitors will experience lag and poor user experiences, perhaps even effecting downloads and transactions to the point where they don’t work at all.
These are all extremely important things to consider when providing a seamless, pain-free user-experience. You want visitors to have the best time browsing your website, accessing info and interacting with actionable content without any problems. But of course, you already know this.
Google consider web speed to be a crucial ranking factor in their efforts to maintain the most useful, effective and consistent experience possible for users. This means, if your website is struggling to accommodate its visitors due to poor hosting, making it slow and sluggish, Google will penalise you and you’ll receive low rankings.
Conversely websites that load faster (web pages that take less than 3 seconds to load) are rewarded by Google and rank much higher.
You can start to eliminate suspects by using less plugins, installing a cache plugin and optimising your images (smaller files, preferably psd instead of jpeg), to root out ant causes of the problem. But most importantly, make sure you have have quality hosting service to make sure load times are not compromised by insufficient bandwidth.
