5 Ways Bad Hosting Can Harm Your Site

Poor hosting can be a headache.

Downtime, slow load times and bad support can make running a website a real chore.

A bad hosting account is an anchor that can keep good sites from soaring and drown more average ones before they can improve.

Here are five ways bad hosting could cause you problems.

1. SEO Impact

If you log into Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll see that Google tracks both crawl errors and site loading time.

If your site is down regularly or moves slowly, Google is probably not going to rank it as highly as a rival’s.

Google is all about providing the best user experience.

2. The ‘8 Second Rule’

When it comes to content, there’s plenty of it on the web, and readers have a short attention span.

If your site doesn’t load in 8 seconds, the visitor will leave.

In fact, other studies have found visitors start to click “back” after 5 seconds, or become frustrated after four.

3. The ’22 1/2 Hour Salesman’

Your site’s performance reflects on your company.

A slow or sluggish site might suggest you don’t much care about the experience your customers have.

There’s an old adage about a website being a 24/7 salesperson for your company. Make sure that salesperson is always working hard.

4. Traffic Spikes

If anything will cause a site to collapse, it’s a spike in visitor numbers.

Only the best hosts will help you weather the storm. Others will leave you to suffer the problem alone.

5. The Key Visitor

If you lose a visitor, is it a big deal?

Sometimes. After all, some visitors are really important.

The one that gave up on your slow-loading site could have given you your next big contract.

How to Avoid Hosting Problems

First, take your hosting seriously. Yes, every site will go down from time to time, but a bad host is leaving you wide open to repeated problems that could harm your business.

Invest in a reliable, fast and efficient host for your site. Your visitors will thank you, the search engines will repay you and, most importantly, you’ll be giving your site a fair chance to be as great as it can possibly be.