Is Web Hosting Services Absolutely Necessary for my Websites Success?

Web hosting services play a vital part in your website’s success. Without a web host you will not have any way to support your site on the Internet, so you must make sure that you choose a quality hosting account that provides a wide variety of features and services. There are some features you should look for in a quality web host.

1 – Support

You want a web hosting service that provides support 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. The reason for this is you need your website up and running at all times, allowing you to make sales. If your website is down it could be costing you a lot of money, not to mention visitors who cannot access your site. If you have a problem at 6 am Christmas Day, you want to be able to contact your web host support and have it taken care of. This is a sign of a good web hosting company. Also, don’t just take their word they offer support round the clock, give them a couple of test calls at off hours and weekends to see if they respond.

2 – Contact Information

You should have all the important contact information for your web host. If this information is not available then you’ll most likely have problems in the long run. If they cannot give you a way to contact them when you have a problem or need help then you may have to wait days before you get your problems resolved. This is unacceptable. If contact information is not listed online keep looking for hosts.

3 – Free Will Cost You

If you are developing a website for business purposes, make sure you buy your own URL and get real website support that you pay for. If you use free web hosts, you will cost yourself money because customers will not take your site seriously as the impression will be that you don’t either.

Some other features are also considered like:-

E-mail

Make sure your web host supports e-mail and allows multiple addresses. You will need this in your business so you certainly want a server that supports this. If not, find another host because most good web hosts allow for e-mail addresses.

Server Space and Bandwidth

You want to be sure your web host has adequate server space so your website has plenty of room to grow. Bandwidth is also important because the more bandwidth the host has, the faster your page loads, which in turn means more customers that will actually make it to your site because it opened quickly.

Consider the following web hosting blunders and do not allow yourself to make these mistakes that can have a seriously negative impact on your website.

Blunder #1 – Contact Information

Make sure your web host has contact information available to you 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. This should be in the form of phone numbers as well as e-mail addresses that correspond to the web host domain name. Make sure you are dealing with a real company that is serious about both their business and yours.

Blunder #2 – Lots of Bandwidth

If you are using a free or cheap web host then more than likely you will not have a lot of bandwidth which could cause you problems with your website. Even if you have to pay a little bit more money, it is worth it to gain additional bandwidth. Make sure you ask about this before signing up with a web host.

Blunder #3 – Generous Disk Space

Many times people find a cheap or free web host and just sign up without ever checking for the amount of disk space. A questing to ask yourself, what happens when the diskspace is filled up? Make sure that the hosts you are considering provide generous amounts of diskspace, if it is limited you might consider using a web host that is larger and offers more services.

Following web hosting blunders are also consider

Web Host Domain Name

Make sure the company domain name matches the web host company name before giving out your credit card information or hosting your website with them. On the Internet it is up to you to decide whether a company is legitimate or not, check out the domain and company name to find a match to be sure.

Security

Regardless of the web host you use and your website design you must ensure that you have secure websites for purchases where people will enter the banking and or credit card information. If your site does not appear to be secure, customers will leave. You want to avoid this at all costs and go to all lengths to make customers feel secure and confident buying from your site.

Plan Ahead

Make sure you have a plan for the future and an idea of your websites growth. Without this you could run into some serious problems if you outgrow your website, shopping cart, or bandwidth too quickly and do not have a plan on how to handle things. Make a plan for slow, medium ,and fast growth so you will know what to do in every situation.

This is a great thread with great information.

These are also consider-

Design

Make sure that whatever web host you use allows you to design your site for ultimate success. If there are any rules or regulations regarding your site design that will possibly impact your sales and the way customers perceive your site then find another host. There are plenty to choose from.

Checkout

Ensure the checkout process is clear, easy, and to the point. People want to buy their products without giving you a ton of personal information. Let them do that or simply make certain fields optional if you are trying to conduct market research.

URL

You want your own personal URL that reflects your business and services. Do not use a free host that gives you some kind of space using their URL with some additional information at the end of the URL that directs it to you. Spend the money and get your own URL that is unique, easy to use, and says something about your company. It will be worthwhile.

When it comes to budget web hosting, there are a lot of dirty secrets that can really hurt your chance of success. However, if you know about these dirty secrets, you will be prepared and better able to handle any possible problems before they arise.

Secret #1 No Experience

There are many budget web hosts on the web that have not been around for very long and have little to no experience at all. The last thing you want to do is sign up with a company that is brand new and inexperienced and be part of their learning curve. Instead, find a web host that has years of experience and is happy to outline the year they started, their growth, and total experience level.

Secret #2 24/7 Support

If you are a company looking for a budget web host, all you want is to be pay less and still get all of the perks of more expensive web hosts, such as 24/7 support. Some budget web hosts do not offer any information on their level of support, but some claim to offer 24/7 support and then actually don’t. Before you sign any agreements with a budget web host, make sure you know whether they answer the phone at 3 a.m. on weekdays or anytime on weekends. Whether the phone is answered or not will be a very good sign as to whether you should sign up with them or keep searching.

Secret #3 Service Level Agreement

Read the service level agreement that is provided by the budget web host. If they do not have one then definitely move on, and if it is not a strong agreement that outlines exactly what will happen and the type of service you will receive in the event of a problem, then you should move on as well. The reason for this is because all web hosts will run into a glitch here or there and you need to know how that will be handled and how it will affect you before entering into the agreement.

Another dirty little secret is many budget web hosts companies are not solely web host companies but offer a variety of other businesses or products as well. You do not want to be in a situation such as this, you want a web host that only focuses on web hosting. Ask before you sign any agreements or give credit card numbers what kind of business they are and where their revenue comes from. This will help you make a decision about whether or not this is the web host for you.

There are many other dirty secrets that are swept under the carpet in regards to the budget web hosting business. The best thing you can do is to simply ask a lot of questions, do a little research, and use the answers you find to help you make your decision.

In the first case the customer is really looking for a large shared hosting plan that allows multiple domains. More frequently in the industry you see the term “Multi-Domain account” to refer to these plans. These customers can be webmasters with a network of websites, web designers, or a company that wants separate websites for their different brands.

These accounts can also be less inexpensive then traditional Reseller plans because they do not need to offer all of the services such as Private label branding. They are essentially shared hosting accounts that allow for several domains.

The second customer is really looking for a turnkey business, a franchise of the parent hosting company if you will. These customers are hosting companies who do not want to carry the overhead of a datacenter or series of managed servers. Using a Reseller Hosting plan allows a hosting company to have a complete professional hosting company without all of the traditional startup costs. Like anything, there are trade-offs versus a dedicated server, but for a small hosting company or startup it is an ideal solution. It allows them to focus on growing a customer base and not infrastructure issues.

How can I Promote my new web hosting business?

Promoting a new company in the crowded industry of web hosting today is really hard. There are many tactics that work well and are legitimate, and you can use them to promote your company. Some of them are-

1. Referral Program

The referral program system is one of the best ways to get new customers. You can setup the system to make your current customers refer new customers. The customers have a special tracking id that they can give to other people they want to refer. This way, when an existing customer’s id has been used the customers receives a commission. Also, you should refer the customer an account where he can check the statistics of his campaign. It’s better to sign up the customer to the referral program so they can start referring people to your site right away. For the management and tracking mentioned above you can use some ready made soft wares that you can find on the web.

2. Word of Mouth

That’s just about the same as the referral program, the difference consists in not paying the commission to the customer that refers new customers. This is a very good way to promote your web hosting service. To make one of your customers refer other customers you should be providing a very good service to make that customer happy. So, make sure you keep the existing customers happy because a happy customer base means more business is coming your way.

You can ask your customers if they are happy and if the answer is positive you can ask them to submit a testimonial or to review your company.

There are a lot of good forums where web hosting is discussed. You can join this kind of forums and contribute and offer help to others members while keeping your signature with your URL at the bottom of your post. You can post in the signature your weekly or monthly special offers.

you can help others on these web hosting forums and can send new customers on your website, meaning more business for your web hosting business. But don’t just go there to post and ad, be active and be a part of the forum’s community.

By offering some kind of special offers you can literally see your traffic soar. You can make a special offer reducing the price of the bandwidth to half, if the price for 100 Mb would be $10 you could make a special offer to $5. This way the customer would save $5 and this is a thing a lot of people are interested in.

For a good profit special rules might need to be applied, like an offer being available for monthly payments only. This might not be a good idea since some potential customers might stay away because they want to prepay for a longer period.

This method might not be good for you but it’s good for the customers and if you will allow the customers to pay in advance that will bring in more customers.

Offering bigger discounts you can get more customers.

Give Bonus with every order.

This one is very good and is very easy to do it for your company. You could give a good bonus for purchasing anything. There are many things that you can give as a bonus, from a special template to a special e-book that the customer might be interested in.