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Even when you are just hosting a regular blog, lag or downtime can cause you to lose a significant portion of visitors. Still, this is not nearly as dangerous as what can be seen in the world of eCommerce. You see, when people decide to entrust you with their money (even if it’s just a few dollars), they tend to be very cautious. Whenever they see lag, they will become afraid that their order won’t be accepted while their money will be withdrawn from their account anyway. As for the downtime, they can always look someplace else for the product they want. These are just two of the reasons why your web host must be completely reliable and up to the task.
Patience Is Not an Online Virtue
According to Kissmetrics blog, most online audience cannot say that patience is their virtue. Namely, if your page fails to load within 4 seconds, you are bound to lose as much as 25 percent of all your visitors. When you convert these visitors to paying customers (of course not all of them), it turns out that you are losing business. As we already mentioned in the introduction, there is nothing easier than looking for the same product someplace else. Once they conduct a successful purchase (or two) from your competitors, they will virtually have no reason to come back. This way, you are also losing return business while your brand loyalty suffers heavy losses. Can it get any worse?
Thinking Local
Next thing you need to consider is the location of your host. Sure, all your business is online so why does it matter? Well, for obvious reasons. The further away you are from the host, the greater the chances are something will happen along the line. If you are hosting an Australian website, it is always better to find a web host with an Australian datacenter. Apart from this, even though some companies offer 24/7 customer support, it is handy knowing that people you are talking to are in your own time zone. For these and many other reasons, you should probably look for reliable web hosting in your target country.
Going Green
Showing your customers that you are mature and responsible is not an easy task. Most companies decide to create this image by going green. However, your business is already online, so you don’t waste paper or other consumables, and you can’t go any greener, right? Well, actually you can. There is a thing known as green hosting, which means that your host is using power-saving hardware or that they are hooked up on a renewable energy grid. Either way, your operation becomes even friendlier towards Mother Earth and you get to write another thing on your list of good deeds.
Think About Backup
Earlier on, we talked about the loss of clients as the worst thing that can happen to your business, but this is not necessarily true. Sometimes, the loss of data can be much worse since it tends to simply erase years of hard work. Luckily, those who have reliable hosts don’t have to worry about such a thing since they always have a backup plan up their sleeve. Sure, there is still the risk of you losing a few days of work, but seeing how these backups are usually done on a weekly basis, it is never much more than that.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, most of these things are something that people who are new to this niche seldom notice. Every green host is bound to put this on their website, but people tend to either not notice or turn a blind eye towards this act of altruism. Finding out whether a host is local or not is even easier, but this is also something people most probably won’t bother to check. As for the rest, you have reviews and customer comments. In other words, you can find all you need if you just try to look for it. To put it short, effort is what separates the best from the rest.
