What any marketer should understand about web hosting

Is marketing web hosting essential? A good analogy I can make is health; until you lose it, you don't appreciate what you have. When you're healthy, you can do the things you want to, but if you're sick, you must put those plans on hold until you get better.

Over a hundred business owners and advertising pros attended the online marketing event I hosted after I spent a month planning it. The decor in the room was what we had hoped for. Everything about the presentation was perfect. All participants were eager to get started on their own online identities for their businesses. It was perfect until I made public my intention to offer a course on online web admins. To show the registration link, I went to the very last slide. A flood of "the website is down," "I can't access the offer," and "I can't register for the course" messages began flooding in from the audience. An involuntary, instantaneous response of "fight or flight" mode was activated. I felt mixed embarrassment and anger as I crumpled to the floor. After spending the last month preparing for this presentation, which lasted for about two and a half hours, I was devastated to discover on Saturday that the site had been down the entire time. I took a deep breath, settled the room down, and suggested that anyone interested could sign up on paper forms and mail them in without paying immediately. After the event and the website problem are resolved, I will also post the sign-up link again.

Following that incident, I contacted the hosting service's customer service department. Technical support was called in, and they requested access to my account to conduct an investigation. After a few hours of IT support, many phone calls and emails, and paying more than the monthly subscription fee, the problem was fixed, and the website was once again available.

Keep in mind, first and foremost, that hosting that isn't safe and a website that isn't well-designed can ruin any efforts to sell or advertise online.

On Black Friday, you might encounter something similar. Unprepared e-commerce sites often go down under the strain of the sudden influx of customers.

If you want my advice on picking a web host, it's this:

1. Take a good hard look at what you'll need.
2. Think about how many people visit your site on average every month and how many people visit at once during peak times or when running a special promotion.
3. Get this information to your supplier so they can anticipate your needs and offer suitable alternatives.

Unfortunately, the back-and-forth with the event's technical staff was a significant source of stress for me when the issue arose. The response time in such an emergency was not what was expected, and neither was the price I paid. Because of the incident, I decided to switch web hosts.

The second thing to remember is how frustrating it is to work as a marketer when customer service is both slow and expensive. If your site goes offline for any reason, you'll want to get it back up and running as soon as possible to avoid losing a ton of traffic and potential sales. You'd prefer that this feature be accessible to you at no extra cost, or at least at a reasonable rate.

When choosing a web hosting service, I recommend reading reviews from past customers to find out how good the company's technical support is.

Should you go with a regional service provider or an out-of-country one?

It's possible that a package from a foreign hosting provider is less expensive, but is it realistic to assume that this is the best option for your company? Hosting your website or campaign pages in Romania is preferable if your company is targeting Romanians. Your site's load time should improve as a result, as opposed to using a server in the United States or elsewhere.

Web hosting is the service of storing your website's files (images, text, multimedia content, code, etc.) on a server that is always connected to the Internet. The web host owns and maintains the security of this hard drive. When users visit your website's URL, their browser on their personal computer requests the server to retrieve the necessary files from the server. The user saves your website's content on their computer. Files hosted closer to the user and on hard drives with faster processors will be delivered to the user more quickly. It's also beneficial to have the files be as small as possible for a speedy transfer. Don't load your website with 10 MB images. Minimize their size to between 200 and 300 kilobytes as much as possible. Before adding images to a blog post or website, I run them through https://tinypng.com/to optimize them.

The number of other websites that are hosted on the same server as yours is another factor that can slow down your site's loading time. More websites hosted on a single server mean more work for the server's processor. Because of this, your website's file transfers will be sluggish. If you don't want to share resources with other sites or if you need guaranteed server performance (VPS), you can ask your web host for a dedicated server or a virtual private server.

As the third piece of advice, keep in mind that hosting your site and pages in the country where most of your customers are from will significantly improve their loading speeds. This is also a significant consideration for placement in search engines.

The fourth piece of advice to keep in mind is to minimize the size of the files you upload to the site. Read up on SEO article writing for more helpful hints.

As a final piece of advice, keep in mind that a dedicated server or virtual private server (VPS) is the way to go if you need a certain amount of processing power at all times. If that isn't possible, your web host should not place your site next to any other sites that receive a lot of visitors.

Is SPAM catching your emails?

Donors may complain that the emails you send them end up in their SPAM folders, but this may not be your fault. When you purchase hosting, you can set up your custom email addresses like my.name@company.com. Well, suppose other companies that send SPAM are also using the server on which your website is hosted and from which you send emails. In that case, the entire server could be compromised, which would harm the delivery of your emails. This shows how important it is to choose a web host with a good reputation that protects the IP addresses it manages.

Finally, you should contact your web host if any of your outgoing messages are in the SPAM folder. It's also crucial that you don't send spam emails to databases you've bought or obtained through other "less orthodox" means.

Although purchasing web hosting services is a bit more technical, it is essential to pay attention if you want to optimize your site to rank first in search results and if you do not want to lose customers when your world is better. Take lessons from those who have been through it. I hope your online lead generation and sales efforts are successful.