How Good Is Your Webhost Provider?

I’ve come to the conclusion there are now three topics you can’t discuss with people: religion, politics, and webhosts. Yes, webhosts! What is essentially a business service people are loyal to their webhost provider, vehemently so!

I’m guilty; I’ve done the same thing. You can be with a webhost provider and never have any problems or relatively few that aren’t promptly fixed. However, and that is a BIG however, unless you are tracking your website with additional monitoring tools:

• Unlikely you are aware your host isn’t giving you that 99% "guaranteed" uptime,
• Or worse, slow download speeds causing a high bounce rate (leaving without reading).

Five Second Load Time – Hasta La Vista Baby

We live in an age of impatient web visitors. They expect instant results. Not only that but Google takes your site speed into account in ranking your website (ouch)!

This past week my website monitoring service started sending me alerts my site was down – three times. I called my webhost and nothing was wrong with my website but one fellow user on my shared webhost server was using up a lot of resources. One user impacting everyone on the same machine! That meant people were getting a very slow response time accessing my site (testing showed up to 18 seconds)! My monitoring service earned its pay in alerting me there was a problem.

Your Webhost May Be Good But Fellow Users May Not Be

Slow download speeds for your website means people leave before your site completes loading. That means they:

• Didn’t stick around to read your blog posts,
• Won’t consider buying from you,
• Negatively impacted your search rankings with Google.

Wow talk about bad for business! Shared webhost accounts means you are sharing it with hundreds of other users. If they have an infected site sending out spam or high traffic, this can impact your site speed (or potentially infect your site).

Test Your Website Download Speed with Pingdom

Pingdom Website Speed Test: Check your website speed with this free tool. Pingdom will give you a site performance grade, tell you how long it took, and show exactly how each item did. This makes it easy to spot those pesky slow loading pictures you uploaded (oops your bad) or if your webhost server is slow to respond.

Site Monitoring: Pingdom monitoring services are a bit pricey for most, but AreMySitesUp (affiliate link) is cheap for a reasonable $35 yearly cost! Accountability – make sure your webhost is delivering that 99% uptime.

Conclusion: selecting a provider for your website hosting is a business decision. This isn’t the area to go cheap or staying true blue because they have helpful customer service. Up time and fast delivery speeds of your website are the true measures of success.

No time to monitor your site and security? See how we can help you!

Nancy Seeger

Nancy Seeger, the owner of Arts Assistance, believes website design is part of the marketing toolkit that attracts your audience. Their roster of clients includes a Grammy artist, coaches, small businesses and non-profits. Get web design insider tips to more easily manage your website and attract your audience.