Staying in Control of Your Website: Why Your Host Matters

One of the first questions we hear from new customers is: what the heck is web hosting, and why do I have to pay for it?

Think of a website as an apartment. You own anything that goes inside your apartment, but you still have to pay rent to live there. In order for your website to appear online, you have to rent out the space. That’s where a web host comes in. A web host connects your content (the meat & gravy of your website) to your domain (your URL) so that anyone can see your website.

And like apartment-shopping, hunting for good web hosting means considering a lot of factors. You can find a place with dirt-cheap rent, but it comes with a dozen cockroaches and the landlord is MIA. Or, you find a penthouse with a stunning ocean view…but the monthly rent costs more than what you make in a year. 

When looking at web hosting, here are the things you should look for:

Security

Website security is always top of mind – remember that dedicated attack on October 22 that left Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and other major sites unusable for hours? An unsecure site puts both you and your visitors at risk of malware or data theft. There are some steps you can take to secure your website yourself, but the easiest way is to invest in a web host with reliable security measures.

Part of our web hosting includes constant monitoring, security updates and malware scanning so that your site is never at risk. We also regularly back up your site, so if a security threat comes along we can restore an old site.

Speed

On average our customers’ sites see 120,000 visitors a day and about 43.8 million visits per year. As visitors overlap and engage with the site, it’s important that they don’t notice any lag. Considering that visitors will only wait 6-10 seconds for a page to load, a speedy site is key. Our web hosting routinely tracks your site’s speed and makes tweaks to keep speed up – resizing large files, compressing images, updating plugins, etc.

Monitoring

Do you have time to watch your website every second of the day? Unless you’ve found a way to time travel (if so, please let us in on the secret) you can’t keep track of your website and your business a the same time. A good web host monitors your site 24/7. With our monitoring, we know most of the time before our clients do if their site has a problem and have restored it before they’re even aware of an issue. 

Our team is all midwest-based and on call 24 x 7 x 365 for all emergency needs and requests. You will speak to a US-based team member who probably knows the inner workings of your site better than you do and can fix it faster than just about anyone out there. With most down sites, we can have them up and running within 15 minutes of becoming aware of the issue.

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Get hosted

Fed up with your current web host? You don’t have to be a web design or digital marketing customer to take advantage of our hosting packages.