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Your chosen web hosting impacts much more than you think! Yes, it’s the digital space that you rent on the internet to house your files and content. But it’s more than just your website’s home. The web hosting you choose can work for you or against you… Even in your digital marketing.
If you’re going to be marketing your website in any way, it’s important to choose the right web hosting plan for your digital marketing efforts.
How Web Hosting Impacts Digital Marketing Strategies
Technically, you don’t need a website to sell products or build a brand. But it sure helps! And if you’ve got a website that needs marketing, you’ve got a web host that could either be helping you or harming your digital marketing efforts.
For example, all your social media marketing efforts will go to waste if you’re sending people to a website that’s slow and not user-friendly. While you might be doing all the hard work to get traffic to your site, if your website is difficult to navigate or makes them wait, they’re not going to stick around to read your content or buy your products.
Your website hosting can contribute positively to your digital marketing efforts… If you choose a good website host. The good news is that many web hosting companies offer SEO solutions, email marketing, and other features that can help boost your marketing efforts.
What to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Plan
Looking for the best website hosting to boost your digital marketing efforts? Here’s what we recommend looking at to help you choose the right one.
Website Traffic and Scalability
If you’re starting from scratch, do a bit of work to estimate how much traffic your website will be getting. If you’ve already got an established website and you’re looking to change web hosts, find the numbers on how much traffic is landing on your website.
This will not only give you a good idea of what kind of hosting plan would work best for your website, but it will also help you figure out how much scalability you’ll need. A shared hosting plan is most likely not going to be scalable enough, so we recommend looking into dedicated, VPS, or cloud hosting options.
If you’re serious about scalability, cloud hosting is the best thing you can invest in. It’s almost infinitely scalable and allows you to add or remove resources as and when you need to, so you’re never using or paying more than you need to.
Server Type
Shared hosting is going to be much less marketing-friendly than others. It’s the most basic of hosting types and is unlikely to add much to your digital marketing strategy. If you get a small amount of traffic, you might be able to use shared hosting, but if you’re expecting low traffic, you probably won’t need to market your site in the first place.
Dedicated hosting is a much better choice for high-traffic sites. You’ll have full control over the server and its resources, so you can add extras quite easily to assist with your marketing, and you’ll also have more than enough resources to handle traffic.
VPS is a close second, but cloud hosting is the best option. It’s extremely flexible, customizable, and secure, and highly recommended.
Bandwidth and Storage
Hosting plans come with finite amounts of bandwidth and storage space. Analyze your website’s needs upfront so you know what sort of storage and bandwidth you need, and do your best to make an accurate assumption of how those needs might increase.
Choose a web hosting plan that allows you to increase your resources if you need to. Flexibility in this regard will give you the space you need to grow without worrying about your website being slowed down.
Website Performance
Users want fast-loading websites. Speed is essential for both a good user experience and SEO ranking, so this is a non-negotiable. Do your research beforehand and find a host that offers fast loading. You’ll notice how much your bounce rates decrease and your SEO ranking improves, just with this small difference.
Uptime is another factor. Choose a web host that offers at least a 99.99% uptime guarantee. The more time your website is down, the more time you’re missing out on converting visitors to customers.
Security
Good security not only keeps your important files and content safe, but it also improves your SEO rankings. Make sure the web host you choose provides an SSL certificate, firewalls, DDoS protection, malware scanning, and regular backups.
This is especially important if your website is going to ask for personal information from your customers, like if they’re paying for products or services through the site. Nothing ruins a business or brand like leaking customer data, so don’t compromise on this.
Mobile Responsiveness
Around half, if not more, of the traffic that websites receive comes from mobile devices. If your web host isn’t optimizing your website for mobile use, you’re missing out on potential sales!
Your web host should help your site to be responsive and user-friendly on both desktop and mobile. This can go a long way towards helping you reach more people, so your digital marketing efforts won’t go to waste.
Data Analytics
Data is essential to analyze the effectiveness of any digital marketing campaign. Choose a web host that provides excellent data analytics, which you can use along with the analytics of your various social media platforms to get a well-rounded idea of how your campaigns are performing.
The data you get from your web host’s analytics features can give you a better idea of how your social media and SEO marketing is working and allow you to make smart changes on the go.
Terms of Service and Policies
It might seem tedious, but we highly recommend going through the hosting company’s terms of service before signing up with anyone. Double-check for hidden fees, loopholes, or any clauses that might hamper your digital marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
There are plenty of web hosting options out there. A2 Hosting, iPower Hosting, Hostinger, SiteGround, WP Hosting… And these are just a few of the choices you’ll have. Choosing the right web hosting plan for your digital marketing can seem like a big ask, but if you tick the boxes mentioned above, you’ll be on the right track to finding the one that’ll be the perfect firm foundation to build on.
About the Author
Paul Wheeler runs a web design agency that helps small businesses optimize their websites for business success. He aims to educate business owners on all things website-related at his own website, Reviews for Website Hosting.