How Your Hosting Company Can Impact Revenue

For years hosting many hosting companies have offered to host websites for as little as $3.95 a month. A small number of our clients used such hosts as a cheap way of creating communities of interest that point back to their corporate website. This worked well because mote search engines were somewhat forgiving about page load speed or the time it takes for an entire page to appear on the screen. That is about to change. Google’s next technology update “Caffeine” designed to make searching faster adds a new wrinkle page rank – slow loading sites will now hurt your ranking and therefore your organic position in search results. Drop in position and revenue may drop as well.

Below are the questions to ask your web guy or prospective hosting company before you buy inexpensive hosting (less than $10 per month):

• How many other sites are hosted on the box where my site will be hosted?
• Do you have a cap on the number of sites you will allow on a single box?
• Do you actively monitor the load on your servers?
• When was the last time and under what conditions did you move a site off o of your production boxes? What lead you to the need to move them?
• What is my committed band-width rate? This is important because some hosts will sell you on the idea that there is no ceiling – that is not true, bandwidth is limited by the number of sites hosted and the total capacity coming into the hosting facility.
• Shared databases – The best question to ask here is “Am I getting my own Virtual Private Server”? a VPS gives your business a great deal of flexibility when it comes to managing the hosting space.
• There are other architecture questions you might ask, but as a business person it is best to leave those up to a tech person.

Full disclosure – Our clients use a number of hosting companies including Network Solutions, the sponsor of Grow Smart Business.

We have an entire organization at your disposal, let 360 Sales Focus help you achieve better sales results with inbound lead generation. Drop by the site today. We are here to help.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 9:25 am and is filed under Coaches Corner, small business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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