Scaling Your Online Business: How Your Hosting Choice Impacts Growth
Choosing the right web hosting service is a difficult balancing act that requires a business to weight ease of use, utility, support, and security differences between platforms to find the one that best meets their needs. One of the most important facets of web hosting for a growing business is scalability. For instance, if you choose a non-scalable hosting plan, your business’s website may suffer from performance issues and downtime, particularly during periods of surging customer traffic, ultimately impacting your customers’ experience and their likelihood to buy from your business.
If you are not currently using a scalable hosting service, you may already find that you are experiencing some of the negative signs that you need to switch to scalable hosting immediately. Is your site experiencing frequent slow loading times? Do you have regular website crashes during traffic spikes? Are you exceeding your storage or bandwidth limits? Are your customers complaining, either to you or on social media, about your site’s poor performance?
In order to understand why a scalable hosting solution is so important, it’s vital to understand the key ways that hosting services can impact your ability to effectively scale your website as your business grows.
- Resource Scalability. An effective web hosting solution should allow you to increase your processing power, bandwidth, and storage to meet the needs of your growing business. You and your web hosting service should be able to work together to ensure your site performs smoothly and quickly even during periods of peak traffic.
- Downtime Prevention. The last thing a business wants is for customers to come to their website only to be greeted with an inability to load the site or a major crash. An effective web hosting service will ensure that high traffic won’t push you past arbitrary hosting limits.
- Enhanced User Experience. Tied in to preventing downtime is ensuring the user has a quick and seamless experience on your site. When you have insufficient hosting capacity, you can experience high bounce rates and frustrated users, leading to less customer engagement and ultimately fewer sales and fewer customer conversions and less retention.
- Cost Efficiency. Scalable web hosting solutions often allow users to pay for the resources they are actually using rather than more than they currently need. This way, you can optimize your costs as your business grows and chances over time. This kind of dynamic pricing solution can save you money over time while allowing you the flexibility you need to grow.
When choosing a scalable web hosting service, there are two primary types to choose from: cloud hosting, which is the most scalable and allows for the addition and removal of resources with a pay-as-you-go model, and managed WordPress hosting, which optimizes WordPress website performance with more support.
Once you’ve made the decision to adopt a scalable hosting service, you will need to choose the scalable hosting plan that’s right for you. There are four key issues that will help you to evaluate your options:
- Evaluate how much traffic you anticipate your site receiving and the resources this will require and ensure the plan you choose can meet those needs.
- Ensure the plan you choose allows for easy upgrades and adding resources so you can scale with the flexibility you need.
- Review the service provider’s performance metrics, particularly its uptime guarantees and server response times, to make sure it can provide the service you need.
- Evaluate how much customer support you will need to manage your website. Not every service provides the same level of support.
Ultimately, your website will benefit from scalable web hosting in order to ensure that you will continue to meet the needs of your customers no matter how big your organization gets—or how fast it gets there.