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Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

The decisions you make about hosting your website are vital, be informed, do it right.

There is so much more to it than choosing the cheapest plan you can find. Hosting can determine user experience, the value of AdWords campaigns and your search engine rankings.

For businesses relying on online marketing, their website is their life-blood and yet they are commonly making the mistake of signing up for a web hosting plan which; costs $2.00 per month, offers no support and runs on an overcrowded server that has poor up-time. This post aims to provide an overview of the things to consider when choosing a company to host your business’ life-blood.

User experience relies on hosting

A fact that continues to surface in internet marketing or web design blogs is that internet users will leave a website within 7 seconds of being referred if they do not find it to be up to scratch. If they spend 7 seconds just on loading your website, given that your website may not be the most attention grabbing design in the world, you have probably already lost them.

Well after experiencing initial slow loading time on your website, your visitors may still encounter poor user experience which forces them to leave – thanks to your web hosting plan. It is likely that features within your pages may contain scripts which will lag on an over-crowded server. Given that in many cases these scripts could be the centerpiece of your website, there is a good chance that your visitors will bounce.

How your web host can determine your AdWords ROI

Imagine, you invest $2,000 per day into the Google AdWords campaigns for your niche online store and the campaigns are live 24/7. You wake up only to realise that your store has been down during the night as a result of server overcrowding and 300 of your clicks went to waste. If your average sale price was $40.00 and your average conversion rate was 3%, you would have just lost $360 worth of revenue due to your $2.00 hosting plan. Would it be worth it?

In addition to this, your web host can play a role in your quality score. A factor used by the Google AdWords system to calculate quality score is the relevancy/user friendliness of your landing page. A landing page which is take 5 seconds to load may well be extremely relevant and have the potential to convert, but the fact that the landing time is inhibiting user experience with cause major detriment to your quality score. To maintain an acceptable level of traffic to your website with a low quality score could cost you hundreds of dollars every week. Is it worth risking that on your $2 hosting plan?

The effect of web hosting on SEO

Google’s #1 goal is to deliver people the most relevant results for any query a user chooses to enter. Google also wants to ensure that relevant information goes hand-in-hand with friendly user experience. Even if your website itself is optimised for fast loading time, a cheap hosting plan could cause your website to load slowly which counts as poor user experience.

Not only can this cause users to think less of you, it may result in search engine giving you a terrible rank for the keywords which you rely on as a source of business.

The one important thing that you should have learned from this post is that you should never be cheap when deciding on a web hosting plan. If your business has a website which is constantly having paid traffic driven to it, consider a dedicated server to further decrease the chances of major lag or downtime (both of which will have a negative influence on your AdWords and SEO efforts). As a service which has the potential to either secure your online ROI or counteract it, hosting needs to be treated like a 24/7 life support machine for your business.

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