It’s such an undervalued asset to any website but people really don’t care about hosting and the importance of hosting in terms of ranking and up time. If you think about hosting, it’s the foundation of any website, it’s the same as building good foundations for a building. If you are going to build a small home, then your foundations need to be strong enough to hold that home up and keep the occupants safe. If you are going to build a skyscraper then your foundations need to be next level and up to the mark to manage the site.
When you build a website, you have to make sure that your foundations are well managed and this is where hosting comes into play. So we need to ask the question:
What is hosting?
Hosting for websites is a service that allows personal or business websites the ability to post a web page on the www (world wide web). A web hosting company is a company that provides the tools needed to host your website on platforms called servers. So in essence, here at Umarketeers we are also a hosting company as we host your website in with our monthly fee which means everything is held in one place.
On the internet there are different browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, IE etc and when you type in an website domain name – eg, www.umarketeers.com this domain will connect to a server that hosts your website.
Now you know what hosting is, you can see the value in it straight away. Without good servers and management it can result in downtime which means loss of traffic and if your site is down repeatedly it can harm your SEO (Google rankings). By making sure you have great trusted hosting in place, you are making a great business decision and with most hosting companies offering 99.8% uptime you can always rely on quality hosting companies like Godaddy, Amazon Web Servers, Cloud Servers and many more.
Servers are also important for the speed of your site, if you host your site on a shared hosting server (which means splitting the space up with over websites) then you have to be careful how much you load your site, you’ll need to make sure you website optimisation is on the money so that images and javascript runs quickly, however, if you have optimised your website and your servers are slow, then all that work will be for nothing. The best thing to do here is to speak to your hosting company and ask them about what type of server you are on (linux is popular for WordPress) and ask for a report on the speed, all hosting companies can provide this for you.
So, in essence, if you want your site to run well, make sure you have the foundations firmly in place by choosing the right hosting provider, one that has a proven record of quality uptime and speed.
