Have you ever wondered why your blog is not able to generate desired traffic in spite of rocking headlines, compelling visuals, and engaging content? You are not alone, since there are many bloggers who are unable to fathom reasons for their blog’s ability to attract visitors even if they have created their own infographics or developed original videos.
It is found that most of the bloggers fail to appreciate significance of web hosting to effectively present their blogs to their desired audience. Just imagine opening a link on a social platform and waiting for an excruciatingly long time for the page to open. Visitors prefer sites that open instantly and the speed of websites significantly depends on choice of web hosting. Even a few seconds delay will lead to abandonment of site by visitors.
There can be shortcuts to achieve faster loading of web pages including reducing amount of multimedia content or compromising with resolution of graphic images among others. However, these options are ultimately going to impact overall quality and objectives of your site.
Importance of web hosting
According to Wikipedia, web hosting service leverages medium of internet to enable organizations as well as individuals to impart accessibility of their websites to public at large. The web hosting service providers or web hosts provide servers on rent and support these with seamless internet connectivity in a facility known as data center.
The above mentioned description offers fundamental overview of web hosting and helps us understand core aspects of hosting. But there is more to it than meets the eye. In spite of providing these basic services, one must note that all web hosts are not equal as far as parameters of efficiency and performance are concerned.
Characteristics of a right web hosting
We often come across high-quality or average services and same applies to web hosting as well. The average web hosting services are the ones that provide slow access to server resources and impact data transfer thereby delaying your website’s loading speed. Top of the line web hosting services make sure that their servers are performing to the fullest and have excellent capabilities of DNS caching.
One of the most significant characteristics of a good hosting service is an intuitive control panel and User Interface. The UI must facilitate ease of setting up CMS applications including WordPress.
Speed of websites in terms of faster page loads needs to be mentioned clearly by web hosts for establishing authenticity of claims. This is essential for an enhanced end user experience.
Consistent web hosting services provides extremely reliable network uptime for outstanding availability of websites. In fact reputed web hosts go one step further and mention uptime in Service Level Agreements. Usually, good web hosting providers are able to maintain 99.99 percent uptime of their services.
Upfront and transparent hosting plans can provide in depth information to clients about the services that are being offered by web hosts against their payments. Established web hosting providers make sure that custom hosting plans for catering to needs of different websites are also provided.
Value of technical service
This is the most vital aspect of a web hosting service. We can also consider it as an after sales service for better understanding. The most important attribute of technical service is round the clock availability of technical personnel who can be reached via multiple modes of communications.
Customers can come across variety of issues such as sales, billing, or a plethora of technical glitches. In web hosting industry there is a myth that expensive services are the best. It is often found that costly hosting plans are actually designed to fleece the customers by exploiting their ignorance about what is right and what is wrong.
Warning signs of below average hosting
On the other hand, economical hosting plans can mean a highly substandard hosting experience. This calls for an in depth research to study plans of different hosting companies and survey multiple web hosting companies for their technical support.
You need to be careful about some red flags that are commonly associated with cheap hosting providers. Although, these providers may be offering fairly good services, the red flags might degrade performance of your website to a significant extent. You need to rule out the possibility of web host being a reseller host if you are looking forward to the quality hosting provider.
Slow speeds and downtime issues can be attributed to negative reviews. Budget hosting providers are usually engaged in cramming too many accounts in a single server causing server overload. In addition to this, presence of multiple spamming websites can also impact online reputation of your website especially in a shared hosting environment.
It is found that budget hosting companies restrict access to MySQL database that can result cause issues in future. There is nothing wrong in making a beginning with economical hosting services. However, one needs to focus on creation of original and engaging content to establish better online reputation.