How Serious Are You About Your Business?

As a small business owner, one of your uppermost thoughts will be how to make the business grow. You’ll need everything it takes—and then some—to move from being the underdog to one of the big hitters.

Understandably, this takes patience, dedication and hard work. It also requires having the right tools to help you compete favorably in the world of business. One such tool is a website; not just any website, but one that will always be available for your customers in order to do business with you.

If you’re serious about your business, you will have scoured the internet looking for the right hosting package and the most appropriate host provider for your website needs. Choosing a host is not something you rush headlong into—especially if you rely on your site to produce revenue for your business, or to attract customers to your brand.

No doubt, during you search you came across the term ‘cloud hosting.’ This is a unique hosting platform that offers the best of both worlds when it comes to shared and dedicated hosting and is something that will be very valuable to the growth of your business.

Brendan Wilde, the Head of Marketing at Umbrellar—a New Zealand hosting provider—during the launch of its Umbrellar Azure Stack, was quoted as saying that “cloud hosting makes it easy for small businesses to achieve their goals in a cost effective and hassle-free manner. This is why businesses are overwhelmingly adopting it as the medium for showcasing their brand to the world. There are many cloud hosting platforms you can adopt to give your business the competitive advantage it deserves.”

Without wasting much time, here are some of the benefits cloud hosting offers small businesses.

Cost effectiveness: If you’re serious about your business, you’re most likely always on the lookout for ways to cut costs without compromising on effectiveness and quality. Starting a business alone can put serious strain on your bank balance; there’s also a plethora of other expenditures you’ll have to cover to get your business off the ground.

However, one thing you don’t have to spend too much on is hosting your website. You could argue that shared hosting is cheaper, but when you consider what you stand to save from improved security against intrusions like DDoS attacks and hacking (which can cripple the business or at least damage your reputation), you’ll realize that opting for cloud hosting will actually save money.

Additionally, the scalability features of cloud hosting means you only pay for what you use. For instance, if you expect an increase in traffic due to recent publicity or because you’re running a discount sale, more resources can be added to your website—just for the period when you expect the increase. This way, your site will be able to accommodate more traffic and you’ll only need to pay for the added resources used during that period.

Improved performance: Nothing frustrates a visitor more than finding a website that’s not performing to expectation. Therefore, user experience and customer satisfaction should be two of your top priorities. Any negative reviews from bad user experience could see your website lose ranking on search engines. This is because UX is one of the ranking factors that search engines use to rate websites.

Poor website performance is one of the issues hosting on the cloud will address. Because your website is using the combined resources of several servers, problems such as poor page load speed and server downtime will not happen. This might not seem crucial, but if you consider that roughly 53% of customers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, you’ll appreciate the importance of speed in growing an online business.

While a sudden increase in traffic can cause a website’s performance to drop, cloud hosting ensures the necessary resources are allocated during that period so that your site is always available and fast.

Better for SEO: If you’re serious about your business, you should be concerned about how well your website ranks in search engines. When search users enter a term or keyword that relates to your brand, is your website displayed in the first few results that show up? SEO is as important for big businesses, as it is for small ones. It puts your brand on a level playing field with those ahead of you, making sure you enjoy equal exposure and opportunities. How does this relate to cloud hosting though? If you understand a bit about SEO, you’ll know that are several factors which influence Google search page ranking.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to two things: usability and functionality. Basically, this related to how easy your website is to use and how quickly it can provide the information that visitors need.

There are several factors that can affect the usability and functionality of a website. On the server side, these are: incorrect server location, poor infrastructure and equipment – or even something as basic as an erroneous connection or bad wires. At the website end, we’re looking at bad coding, too many add-ons, poor design structure, and so on. With cloud hosting, the server side issues are eliminated.

As long as you get the design side of things right, the result will be a faster website, better performance and subsequently, improvement in SEO. Needless to say, these are qualities that can improve your site ranking and attract more visitors, who will spend more time there.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about your business, ensure that those small matters that can distract you are taken care of in time, so that you can enjoy the freedom to face the other important aspects of your business. So, the question is, how serious are you about your business?