Every end-customer dreams of the perfect website. They have visions of traffic, engagement, sales, market share, and other business benefits they hope to achieve. Web hosting is a vital part of making those dreams come true.
Customers often take perfect web hosting for granted, although they are quick to complain if the hosting services they use have problems in any of the following areas:
- Performance. Web sites must respond quickly to requests, display web pages rapidly, and handle peak traffic and loads without significant degradation in the quality of service.
- Security. Hosted websites must benefit from strict security, ensuring confidentiality and integrity, without hampering website
- Availability. Your web host customers must be able to serve their customers and employees via their websites without skipping a beat. Unscheduled downtime should never happen, and scheduled downtime should be kept to the bare minimum.
Problems Waiting to Get You
As a start-up, growing or established web host company, you’ll therefore need to offer hosting resources that handle all of the above. Providing and maintaining such resources can be a challenge, however. Possible pitfalls can be:
- Lack of scalability hindering growth. While some customers may pressure you to own and control your platform, this can limit the growth of your business.
- Too much time to patch and upgrade. Is operating system maintenance a core competence? Does it differentiate you from competitors? Such maintenance activities can be a real time sink.
- Constant firefighting. If you and your team are continually having to solve problems, there won’t be any time left for building solutions and customer relationships.
Go for Value
The common element in each of these pitfalls is that even if you work hard to correct the problems, you’re unlikely to get any additional thanks or business from your customers. After all, their attention is focused on their business objectives. They would rather have added value in the form of advice to help them get more out of their company website, e-commerce system, corporate social network, or any other web-based system they want you to host for them.
Use a Partner and Focus on Your Web Host Strengths
The alternative is to use good quality hosting resources that can be scaled as needed from a third party provider, such as a trustworthy data center like Handy Networks. When you have a hosting platform partner that can be relied on to provide all of the basics – performance, security, continuity – then you can focus on helping your customers grow their use of their websites. That means better communications, marketing, sales, and service that your customers can provide their markets, and more business and a stronger reputation for your web host company.
Look Even Better to Your Customers
Does that make your web hosting company any less attractive in the eyes of your customers? No – indeed, on the contrary, it can make you look even better. A reliable, high-quality data center as your partner can provide instant credibility together with assurances of longevity and certification to industry IT standards. All of which is maintained and evolved by trained professionals for your benefit and the benefit of your end-users, while you add the real web host added value that builds customer satisfaction, loyalty, and references.
How important are industry certifications for hosting compliance and security to your customers?