The current statistics show that there are over 1,2 billion websites on the internet The total number is poised to increase with many third-world countries from regions such as Africa and South America are now pushing the growth.
Arguably, considering such a staggering number of websites is online, only a small fraction of them are business and company websites, while there are also hobby, personal, sport, fan-sites and many others that are there simply to provide a different information online.
One way you can provide this for your website is to choose a good web hosting provider or if you choose a bad one, well good luck.
How can a bad hosting influence your website?
A bad hosting service can have a number of negative consequences to your website, and we will discuss them here, and these include:
- Loss of audience
- Negative SEO impact
- Security risks
The first and most important disadvantage of a bad web hosting is the unavailability of your website during peak hours, due to the web hosting using inadequate servers, or generally, poorly managed and overpopulated servers running too many websites at once.
This issue of unavailability of the website will result in loss of your website audience, and especially if you are a business, you will be losing potential customers and consequently loss of profit. Even if your site is about a hobby, losing audience due to bad web hosting is still an issue.
Next, we must mention that website SEO is no longer only about keywords and content, but now search engines such as Google and others actively measure your website page loading speed, and penalize search ranking for pages loading under 4 seconds.
Your goal with the website you own is to get a positive search ranking so that even more people will find about your site and visit it. If your site is receiving SEO penalties it will remain at the back end of search engine results and will not receive natural traffic from them.
Additionally, you need to be aware that the average modern internet user has a broadband internet connection which loads websites fast, and if your website is slow he will not wait and will instead bounce to another site.
Finally, we need to discuss security issues with web hosting. Websites are a target for hackers and malicious people on a daily basis.
The purpose of an attack usually is to infect your website with malicious code, get sensitive information about you or your customers (emails, login data, credit card numbers … etc.).
Now, because network systems and servers are built by people, there is no perfectly impenetrable website, but a reliable and secure web hosting service will impose a greater level of security as well as be harder to attack meaning attackers will avoid your website and go for other less-secure targets.
How to recognize a bad web hosting service?
Having understood the previously explained possible negative effects that a web hosting can have on your site, we can say that a bad hosting would have one or more of these negative effects on your website.
Knowing that, we must ask you a few questions:
- Does your website receive more visitors in the early or after-hours than at the expected
- peak traffic hours?
- Are your website pages loading swiftly or sluggish?
- Did your website suffer a hacker or other malicious attack?
Now, before we continue, I would like to briefly mention that the cause for any of these negative issues may also come from bad website management.
The website may be slow because you put hundreds of images per page, or a hacker used an exploit in an outdated software you are using to build your website, meaning that before you accuse your hosting company of being a trash web hosting, make sure you did manage your site well.
We will discuss proper website management and maintenance in another article, while now, in case you did manage yours well and still there are one or more issues with the website then it probably is a bad web hosting issue.
Thankfully, you are at the right place to receive valuable information about web hosting, so you
will make the right choice when needed.
Conclusion, how to avoid bad hosting and get a good web host?
Well, you can avoid bad hosting by recognizing good ones, and it is not that hard. One major marking of a web hosting company that is confident in how they operate their web hosting is the 30-day money-back guarantee.
While you initiate a hosting service, the 30-day period is enough to spot the negative effects of a web hosting mentioned above, and while you are able to opt-out you can do so.
Not that large of a tell that the company is confident with their web service is the site migration (transfer) included with the hosting plan, most likely as a free service. The free transfer service means they are eager to transfer and have you with them, and confident that you will stay.
