Starting a business is an exciting time, yet it can also mean a lot of start-up costs. You have been spending money to get your venture off the ground and now you are ready for the money to start flowing the other way. When it comes to your website, you may be tempted to cut corners and pay for the most inexpensive hosting service that you can find. This type of hosting is frequently called shared hosting. You know the companies that offer this. They first came busting out of the gate years ago during Superbowl halftime commercials to market their cheap hosting services. And cheap, can really mean cheap, in a lot of important ways. This post will outline the benefits of ‘business class’ hosting and exactly what you get for the amount you pay each month.
Is Your Site Up All the Time? Are You Sure?
Do you have an uptime guarantee with your shared host? Is it sufficient for your business? If you actually started monitoring your site’s uptime you would see how often your site is unavailable. The reality is that what they charge per month isn’t enough for shared hosting companies to communicate with you every time your site goes down. And for sites with e-commerce, it’s a big deal when the site is offline even for a short time. They may state that your site will experience 99% uptime. This seems pretty great, right? Well when you look at that over a year, it actually means that your site has the potential to be offline for 3 days, 15 hours and 36 minutes. Business class hosting with a partner like Precision Pages provides you with excellent uptime–99.99% of the time. That extra .99% means your site only has the possibility of being down 52 minutes and 34 seconds of the year.
A Good Back-up Prevents a Bad Mess Up
You have probably been in this situation at some point: you make some killer changes and additions to your web pages. But that same day, WordPress or Drupal released a plugin or module update and after implementing it, your new content is screwy, or your pages are outright broken. Does your shared hosting partner make backups of your site? Most do not.
A good hosting partner might even offer a development environment for your site so that you never have to risk making changes on the live site until they are proven. Additionally, a solid hosting partner will be making backups and will have confidence in those backups. This gives you the freedom to be bold on your site, work on the back end, and if you, or something else breaks your site, you can recover quickly.
Hello From The Hosting Side
When there’s a problem with your site it can be very difficult to get a hold of someone by phone at your shared hosting company. And when you do get through, you can usually expect an upsell sales pitch, or an offer to fix what you need, at an additional price. The extremely low fee you are paying each month does not include extra support.
Business hosting companies charge enough of a monthly fee so that they can be available when you need them. At Precision Pages there are no hidden fees, and you won’t be hustled off the phone. Additionally, hosting with Precision Pages includes one-on-one time over the phone for up to an hour each month.
In Part 2, learn about content delivery networks; performance and security; the type of relationship you can expect from a business class hosting partner; and how your hosting choice affects your search ranking.
Learn More About Precision Pages Business Class Hosting Services
