Choosing a good hosting company at the beginning is very crucial for bloggers. This is because, later on, you need not regret or go through the painful process of things like site uptime, SEO impact, migration or backup/restore.
Most businesses use blogs as a medium to engage with their existing clients as well as to attract potential buyers. Professional bloggers use the platform to create, engage and monetize niche specific audiences.
I do agree the fact that the content is vital for any blog, but you can’t ignore the fact that a good hosting is also very crucial regardless of the quality of content you publish on your blog.
Most bloggers are unable to analyse their needs by keeping the future in mind hence end up making a wrong choice.
You might be thinking, Web Hosting??? What’s the big deal? Let’s see why it so important for your blog.
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User Experience
Most bloggers ignore about how a user who comes to your website feels about it. I am not talking about the content of your blog but the experience from the time he clicks till the time the site loads on his browser. Some questions that should be considered are and should be thought of are-
Does the site load correctly?
Is the site loading time higher than the standards?
Are your users facing error such Error 403 etc. often?
You may think. What is the harm in losing few visitors?
The truth is that each and every visitor should be regarded as important as the other one. Maybe this visitor whom you are ignoring turns out to be a regular reader or maybe be a buyer.
Down the line, you will be losing on a lot of leads and potential users which you could have easily gained.
User engagement is critical for any blog. They should not face any trouble in accessing the site. As it is said-
“First Impression Is The Last Impression”
If you are tad bit serious about your blog and thinking of making it a brand, then please follow the points above. This will help you in creating a good user base who supports and interacts with your blog.
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SEO
If you care about rankings, then you should care about a good web hosting as well.
Let’s see why?
There are over 200 ranking factors on Google. You may know some of them if not all. Both Google and Bing uses site loading time as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders are smart enough to estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and file size.
The changes might not put you on the top spot of Google if you invest on the crazy fast server but it is still prominent.
If your site is down when a search engine is attempting to visit your site, then your rankings might be adversely affected. Everybody including you and me love organic traffic. So if you want to rock on Google always invest on a good hosting company.
Higher ranking = More Costumers = More Conversions = Higher Revenue
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Loss of Revenue
You always strive to generate more revenue from your blog. There is nothing wrong. Every blogger in this world wants to earn more.
You might me thinking that how hosting and revenue relate to each other.
Let’s see how.
Most hosting providers claim to provide you with 99% uptime, but not all companies follow the same. Let’s say your site goes down. In such case, your visitors will not be able to see your contents (may be reviews, or ultimate guide that lead your visitor to any product with your affiliate link?). Moreover, if you sell an online product, then you may lose potential buyers and earnings.
Did you know – Amazon recently had a 40-minute outage which cost them about $5 million dollars.
You may not be as big as Amazon, but still, it will affect you and your earnings. So in case if you are saving some dollars per month by hosting your site on a cheap hosting plan or company, you should think again.
Are you saving or losing money?
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Security and Site Backup
Well, there is ‘no 100% perfect solution’ to secure your blog. Still site’s security should be on the top of your priority list.
What happens if your blog is hacked?
Your year’s effort might go down the drain if you are not able to restore everything back as if was before.
There are many times when your site crashes. They may be a dozen of reasons due to which the crash might have happened. It also is possible that hacker got into your blog and replaced your index.php file or your entire database got nuked, or the server had a severe disc failure.
Does your web host backup your site regularly? If yes then you need not worry. But if NO then you are in trouble.
A web host company should be able to restore back your site or a big part of it no time. I host most of my sites with SiteGround, they take care of security, and restore or related work if required.
You may know Amit Agarwal, a famous blogger from India or may have visited his website Labnol. Exactly four years ago hackers hacked and deleted multiple websites of his.
You should also know if your Web Hosting Company –
- If the website backup was taken regularly
- If the site backup is done easily via the control panel?
- If you can restore the backup easily
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Peace of Mind
A blogger has more work than always to think about his website security. You need to write content for your blog, promote it and even collect important emails for future promotion or leads.
You are already spending around 10-12 hours on your blog if you are a full timer. Isn’t that too much?
One does not want to think about these questions every other hour.
Is my site down?
Is my blog showing some error to my visitors?
Will my blog will be hacked? Will all my hard work go to waste?
So if you want these question not to pop-up every time then invest in a good web hosting company (or stop blogging instead!) so that you are always secure and safe.
6.24/7 Live Support
You may not need any help now, but you may need it in the future. Let’s say your site is down. You want to get it back live as soon as possible. But this won’t be possible without telling the web hosting company about your problem so they can fix the issue.
In case the support sucks or you unable to get your word out because of some reason, then you are in a fix.
What we want is someone who can throw us the life-saving rope instantly when we press the S.O.S button.
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Easy to Use Control Panel
It is a nightmare for a non-technical person to host his site on a complex control panel. A user-friendly and functional hosting control panel is very, very important for any user. Nobody likes to read 4000 words on setting up his new website on any platform.
It doesn’t matter if your Control panel is a Plesk or a third party one if it is user-friendly. Nobody wants to depend solely on the tech support team for simple tasks such as some basic server changes.
- Scalability
If you are serious about blogging, then there will come a time when your traffic will start to increase. Most bloggers use free and paid strategies to increase the traffic. With the growth in traffic, your daily page views and real times (page views) will also increase. Your current web server should be strong enough to handle the increasing number of visitors.
Even if it can’t, then there should be an option for you to upgrade to a better plan in the future which shall be able to accommodate the changes.
Please Note – There is no such thing as “unlimited resources”. So be wise in choosing your hosting company of choice.
One Last Thing…
My suggestion will be going for a web hosting company that has a good reputation.
Choosing a hosting provider solely on price is not worth the hassle and headaches if your site goes down. Are you satisfied with your web hosting provider? What steps did you take the last time you experienced issues with your site? What features are you looking for?
Share your experience by leaving a comment below.
You are right, web host is very integral part of good website. If a host isn’t good, one’s website is bound to go offline again and again. It is better to choose a webhost who has good reputation and has live chat support. Web host who cares about their clients reply to support tickets in minutes so that issues can be resolved and site stays uptime all the time.
Different sites or blogs have different needs. When you are choosing a web hosting provider, remember that what you want is to pick up the web host that suits your needs.
It’s not about finding the best web host in the world; rather, it’s about finding the RIGHT web host.
Hello Travis,
You are right, Finding the Right Web hosting is important, not the best web hosting.
Hi Fakharuddin,
Much needed article for a newbie blogger who wants to know why webhosting is so important for their site.
Here you include all the points on why choosing best webhosting is so crucial. I think point number 4 and 6 are the two most important thing that everyone should look first.
Anyway great article and thanks for sharing.
Cheers
Thank you for sharing such a informative article. Thank you again.
This very good article and informative too.
Share some SEO skills …..for how can i rank my web page.
Hi Fakharuddin,
Great post, I agree with all your points, choosing the best hosting is very important for our blog; having a stable web hosting can make a huge difference.
Informative post, Thanks for sharing! 🙂