05 Mar Common Website Mistakes #10 – Not using Business Hosting
What kind of hosting do you use for your business? Did you know that the wrong choice could end up costing you thousands of dollars in lost sales? Learn more about why you need strong, robust and quality business website hosting:
Hi there, my name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com. Today, we’re wrapping up a series on simple mistakes that are easy to avoid when it comes to the management of the website side of your business, because there is really absolutely nothing worse than having customers visiting your website, having them crash and burn, die a horrible death because you’ve not done the simple things you can do to keep your website online and running well.
So number 10, the last in this list, is really to do with that. With your hosting, and we talked about hosting a little bit earlier, but you don’t want to choose, I guess choose isn’t the right word. You don’t want to have hosting that punishes you for your success.
Here is the way it works, and I saw this a little while ago with a person who became a client for obvious reasons. Their business was growing, the products sales were flowing, people were coming and going, and all sorts of wonderful things were happening on their website. And then, their bandwidth limit was rigged. I think it was only something like 15,000 people in a particular day, bang, the website went down, the hosting provider said, “No, that isn’t going to happen on your current plan. I don’t think so.” You can go and click the button, you can upgrade, you can pay more money and you’re on a better plan, but why would you want to be with someone like that in the first place?
The simple rule of thumb is this, you run a business. Please tell me you run a business. Because if you run a business, not a hobby then you need to have business-class website hosting not hobby hosting. It’s that simple. What we do with all of our clients is we talk to them, we find out what kind of business have you got running, what kind of website traffic are you going to be having, and we give them a custom plan. Yes, I’ve got three general plans, but then I customize them as need be.
Now, classic example of this is coming out very shortly on the annual calendar. One of our clients runs a massive local event which we’ll see them in at least in a single day get over 100 gigabytes of traffic just in one day on a massive local event. Now, in previous years, they have struggled with their hosting. We’ve taken them on. I’ve put them onto my brand new VPS server which is just for my own personal clients, and we’re working with them. We’ve set up a CDN, a content delivery network, we’ve worked on their emails, we’ve worked on getting them authenticated, we’ve worked on a good system, a good server and a good setup. So they’re not going to have any problems this year. But we customized it to their individual needs.
I have another business I’m talking at the moment. They run four different websites all targeting the same type of market place but with different products looking to move them on all to their whole system of marketing and helping them grow their businesses. But before I do that, because I know one these websites is incredibly popular, I need to find out. I need to look at the numbers because the numbers tell the whole story, folks. I need to make sure that I customize my hosting just for them. Why? Because I care about their business. It’s that simple. They run a business not a hobby.
Two different types of hosting that are out there. Well, maybe three. There’s corporate which is not the marketplace I’m in, there’s small and medium business which is exactly what I do, and then there’s hobby. Cheap and nasty hobby hosting will never have this problem. You’ll have the other problems most likely but not this one.
With your business though, I want you to look at it and think, “What if I was to run this advertising campaign, and what if I was to be successful? Is that going to cost me? Is it going to ruin me? Are my backups taking up too much space on my server, on my hosting? Am I getting error messages? Am I getting shut down at the end of every month because I’ve used up my bandwidth?” These are easily avoidable problems I see regularly with new clients coming to us on their previous hosting servers.
Folks, you don’t want these things to happen to you. Not for this, not for any others in this entire series of easily avoidable things, mistakes that people keep making when it comes with the management of the website side of their business. It comes down to this. Whomever you host with, whoever is setting things up, whoever is helping you manage the website side of your business, please, please, please, make sure that they care about you, not just the numbers. They care about you customers, not just the dollars that you bring to them. That’s the kind of person you want to partner up with from your website side of your business, and of course we can help you with this. For our customers here in Australia, we do this all day, every day.
Okay, folks, thank you very much for listening. My name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com. We’ll be starting a new series again next week. I look forward to talking to you. See you then. Bye-bye.
