Website hosting
Good hosting is critical if you want to win new business from your website.
Better hosting means a better ranking websiteWhy is hosting important?
If your website hosting is not good enough, your website will be slow, and you will lose business.
As you’ve spent time and money getting a new site developed and the web optimisation is done – you shouldn’t stop there – your website hosting is just as important as your website.
If you’re wondering why your new site, with all its content and SEO, is failing to rank for even the simplest of keywords, it could be the fault of your hosting arrangements.
How to choose hosting.
There are 1000s of options when it comes to hosting your website, so choosing the right hosting environment can be tricky.
There are a few basic questions to ask yourself when looking at hosting options:
- How important is my website to my business?
- How big is my website?
- Does my website have complex functionality?
- Where are my customers?
How important is your website?
In our experience, most businesses, no matter how small, consider their website to be extremely important to their business. Any downtime whatsoever is seen as an issue, and the site must not be slow.
This suggests that all websites are important to their owners, and therefore why host such an important marketing tool on cheap hosting?
How big is the website?
The larger the website, the most space you will need to host it, and this can affect its performance.
Hosting companies that offer unlimited storage should be avoided as they offer this to everyone and this slows down servers.
If you have a large site with lots of pages or you host lots of files on your site, you are going to need a hosting account designed for this.
Is your website complex?
Complex websites with additional functionality like WooCommerce or Events are processor-heavy and need hosting that is designed to accommodate this.
Like your laptop, if you try to get your server to do too much, it can slow down and eventually crash; hosting is no different. Complex websites need better processors, more RAM and an advanced set-up.
Where are your customers?
If your customers are mainly based in the UK, you don’t want your website hosting in the USA. Ideally, your site should be hosted in the same country as your customers.
The main reason for this is to reduce latency and make your site load faster, but there are other benefits that we’ll cover-off.
1 in 4 visitors:
Will abandon your website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
46% of users:
Will not come back to your website if it does not perform well.
64% of shoppers:
Who are dissatisfied with their visit will shop elsewhere next time.
A one-second delay:
Reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
Don’t use cheap or free hosting.
Why go to all the trouble of making your website as good as it can be to try then and host it on a cheap-as-chips account?
It’s well known that website speed is a key factor in Google’s algorithm when deciding which websites to rank.
Using cheap website hosting can mean that your site is facing an uphill struggle as free or cheap hosting accounts will affect the following:
- Time to first byte – this is how long it takes your server to deliver the first data to the visitor’s browser – this includes the time it takes to connect (the wait) and the time taken to respond
- Delivery of the data – how long it actually takes the server to serve up the files to the browser
- How well is your site ranked – is your site sitting on the same server as a load of spammy websites? Google will not like that.
Check your site.
Here are three free resources to check your sites hosting performance.
Pingdom.
This tool shows you a waterfall of files and speed issues together with a score and page size.
Best website hosting for WordPress and other options
Regarding WordPress hosting, it’s best to have an agency that fully understands your WordPress install and a hosting company that understands the unique requirements of hosting WordPress websites.
When we host your website, your site will live on what we think is some of the best UK website hosting.
We use UK-based data centres (as well as global CDNs), and we are your first point of contact for anything hosting-related.
For non-WordPress sites, there are alternative types of web hosting available, so we can discuss the options – whatever your site is built with.
Why host with Toast?
We look after everything – from DNS and email to your website and the server. Should anything go wrong, you can call our team and we’ll get on it right away.
We also have our own server support staff that are responsive and (as we are a big customer) we get preferential treatment.
We’ve found that simply by moving sites to our hosting we improve the Page Speed score of that website by up to twenty points – good hosting really does make a difference.
Managed.
We look after every aspect of your hosting for you, and if you notice an issue (that we don’t automatically fix), we are your main point of contact.
Speed.
Moving to host with Toast will improve the speed of your website, and we can prove it. Our servers are optimised for speed and performance.
Support.
Administering a complex hosting environment is best left to the professionals. We receive priority support from our hosting partner.
Uptime.
Our hosting platform provides a 99.95% uptime service level agreement so you can be sure that your site is on a reliable platform.
WP Engine.
We’re a WP Engine Advanced Agency Partner.
With over 25 experience in managing WordPress hosting, we know when we find a great hosting company, and that’s WP Engine.
Their WordPress hosting is second to none, and there are plans to suit all budgets.
We host 100s of websites with WPE, and they all benefit from:
- Rolling 30-day backups with one-click backup and restore
- Production, staging and development environments to work on your site
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates
- Cloudflare integration
- Ultra-fast caching and optimisation
- Unparalleled technical support
- UK-based data centres
For larger sites, there are lots more optimisation options, redundancy and bespoke hosting platforms.
We host a wide range of sites with WPE, from a large Housing Association with tens of thousands of monthly visitors to small personal blogs.
Prefer your own hosting account?
Some of our clients prefer to have their own accounts with WPE, and we simply have control panel access to manage the hosting for them – no problem.
More than just hosting.
We also help clients with the daily management of their WordPress websites – we call this SiteCare.
Hosting is hosting; site management and technical support and updates are different, so we provide a service called SiteCare to help our clients with their WordPress installation.
Charges start from £40 ex VAT per month.
More information here.
