Improve Your Site and Business in 2015!

Can you believe it? It is almost 2015!

If you are a business website owner, we don’t have to discuss the importance of having an online presence.  As long as your website is the hub of your Internet marketing campaigns, you are engaging and posting relevant content, you would have done what the majority of business owners are NOT doing.

What else can you do to improve your online efforts?  Well, glad you asked. 🙂

The best thing you can do is get better web hosting.  If you are still on a plan that costs $5 a month, you are on basic web hosting.  Nothing wrong with it but it is not mission critical and it serves a simple purpose to get a website up quick and cheap.  That is it.

When you upgrade your web hosting to a business grade service, here’s how you benefit.

Reliability – higher availability – better customer experience, improved company image.

1. Built in Redundancy – several servers serve up your site via the cloud; if one goes down, another takes its place.
2. CDN – A content delivery network improves the site’s reliability due to multiple servers showing your web pages.
3. Database is on an isolated SSD platform to improve security and reliability.

The built in redundancy is a huge upgrade to consider. The cloud platform is a group of multiple servers (hardware) help distribute the workload and each server component is isolated to handle it’s own work load or take over for another server. I won’t go into all the details, that alone will give you peace of mind.

Performance – faster websites – better customer experience, better sales conversion and Improved SEO

1. Solid State Drive Disks improve data scanning with laser like quickness
2. CDN – Global content network brings your web pages closer to your site visitor; faster pages.
3. Optimized Server & Software utilizing today’s caching techniques.

Lets face it, everybody likes a fast website.  Per Google and Amazon, every second a page takes to load, you are losing potential sales. And ever since Google announce, page speed is considered in their SEO algorithm, marketing experts took hosting more seriously.

Security – protected websites – secured data and automatic back ups;  Improved reliability, performance & recovery

1. Protection at the Network level – host your server inside of a private cloud for a layer of protection.
2. Server & Site Firewalls – additional layer of protection to fight the bad guys.
3. Automatic back ups- In the event of a breach or infection; instant restoration.

Using software and hardware at the network, server and website level is a must today.  If you value the work you invested in your website why wouldn’t you protect it?  We can do our best to fight off the bad guys, but their efforts are just as good as our own efforts.  If a breach happens, you need to recovery quickly.

Communications – Reliable delivery, better protection and customer relations

1. Integrate a separate Email Transaction platform to distribute the email load and improve delivery to the inbox.  If you rely on custom forms (e.g. contact form) for leads or work orders, don’t risk missing an email.  Security is tightening up and you need a more sophisticated email than the one that comes free with your cPanel or control panel.
2. Use a separate email service for email communications.  This will drastically improve your site performance and security because a separate platform is handling all over your email inbox, security and delivery. Simple email will not cut it.  You will lose messages, impact performance and put your hosting at risk.
3. Mobile access –  Smartphone mobilesync is critical to customer communications. Professional email services have apps to leverage email from what ever location.

Communications was something I hadn’t considered before.  A few years ago, we noticed an increase support tickets, with issues fighting SPAM, email not delivered due to authentication and email services going down. We found it better to go with a 3rd party service like Google Apps, Rackspace or others that have built an entire network platform to handle email, fight SPAM and an Authentication feature (e.g. SPF/DKIM) to get emails delivered. Basically, the bigger email services work with the latest technology to prove that your email is not SPAM/Malware and work with ISPs.

There you have it.  Nothing really you didn’t know right?  Improve your web hosting, you will be glad you did.  We spend more resources on design and features, forgetting that it is all for nothing if the site goes down.  🙂

Have an incredible and happy New Year from the Koomohost team!

In case you didn’t know, here at Koomohost, we implement all of the above.  Connect with us and lets discuss how to improve your business and/or website.