How Does a Poor Web Hosting Service Lose You Customers?

A web hosting service allows individuals and organizations the space to showcase their websites via the World Wide Web, a large collection of websites hosted on web servers all over the world. A web host is a web server or computer where all of a website’s html files and graphics reside, and these servers are usually super computers with huge hard drives, or an array of hard drives.

Why is it so Important to find the Right Web Hosting?

1. Personal Website Hosting: If you‘re looking for hosting for your own personal website eg. a hobby site, you might be willing to sacrifice reliability and speed for low cost, but this is about the only scenario where this is acceptable.
   
   
2. Small Business Website Hosting: Most small businesses today, even if they don’t have a website, use email. For a small business to lose its website for a day would not be good but it might not be the end of the world. However, to lose important emails or have them delayed until the next day can cost more money than cheaper hosting can save in a year.
   
   The reliability of the web hosting service is even more vital for companies that have complete setups online – many companies receive orders from their customers online, provide customers the facility to track their orders, and coordinate with their business partners such as suppliers, so that all the information is relayed quickly and efficiently to complete the loop. The net can be a remarkable tool for small online businesses, but this whole house of cards is built on the foundation of a reliable server!
   
   
3. Large Business Web Hosting: To a lot of larger businesses the cost of web hosting is not a problem. The important thing to remember though is that in these circumstances the stakes are much higher if things go awry – having one anxious email user without their email is bad, but having a thousand is a career changing event!
   
   Also, large companies need to be vigilant in safeguarding their customer account database to ensure privacy and justify their trust. So opting for the best web-hosts in the business for their operations makes sense.

What Makes Web Hosting Good?

1. Appropriateness – Managed dedicated hosting is when you lease the server but the web hosting company is the one responsible for managing the server in terms of server uptime, patching, warranty and many other aspects. Ask for professional help to decide whether shared, co-located, or dedicated hosting is right for you.
   
   
2. Support – Ensure the web hosting company has a staff of qualified system administrators. Sign up with a web hosting company with sufficient experience to run and operate a wide range of applications.
   
   Ensure your host has data centres with all the necessary infrastructure. It is also worth checking their connectivity. Make sure they have proper security measures protecting their data centres, server or network.
   
   
3. Reputation - Ensure that you fully understand and are certain about the business stability and reputation of the web hosting provider. It would be wise to sign up with a renowned web hosting provider with adequate expertise to avoid any possible problems in the future.
   
   
4. Location – Very cheap hosting is often located in obscure countries, making both speed and Search Engine rankings suffer. Beware!
   
   
5. Price – Although it might be an important factor in selecting a web host, don’t turn price into the main decisive factor. If you are only interested in the financial part of web hosting, there are considerable risks – low level connectivity and uptime, as well as lack of proper hosting support.

So ask the people who design your website for the best possible Web Hosting they can offer, and see if it meets your needs!

What Use is Your Companys Emailer if No-one Actually Reads It?

Every marketer’s nightmare is the scenario where you’ve sent out this perfectly crafted e-mailer that’s taken hours to refine and polish until it represents exactly who you are as a company and what you really stand for, only to watch in horror as it is rudely bounced out of somebody’s in-box as spam.

Obviously, admission to the E-mailers’ Hall of Fame awaits those who can get their e-mailers to the right recipients at the right time and then make sure they’re actually read. Is that such a tough ask?

Your E-mail Marketing Campaign is No Use Unless You Have These Features:

1. Email Marketing Tracking – Insight into your email campaign performance is essential to maximize campaign effectiveness. Complete message reporting includes opens, clicks, bounces, successful deliveries, unsubscribes, and message forwards.
   
   
2. E-mail Response Reporting – Learn about the behaviors of any contact in your account. View how a particular subscriber reacted to different email messages. All feedback should be available to you in easy-to-read charts and tables.
   
   
3. Assured Deliverability – Whitelist agreements and feedback loops with major ISP’s ensure that your e-mails are delivered without a hitch.
   
   
4. CAN-SPAM Compliance – Make sure your messages conform to anti-spam legislation and privacy laws. Typically you are required to include a valid physical address, provide a one-click unsubscribe feature, and not use lists of purchased addresses that may not have given valid permission. ‘Opt-in Marketing’ is the way to go!
   
   
5. Message Scheduling – Prepare and edit your messages on your schedule, but make sure to send your message only when you want it to go out.
   
   
6. List Exclusion – Exclude specific lists or segments from receiving a message. Keep it targeted!
   
   
7. Signup Forms – Add a signup form to your website to convert visitors from your website into email list subscribers.
   
   
8. Automated Subscription Management – Your contacts should be able to automatically subscribe or unsubscribe from their list with no interaction from you.
   
   
9. Bounce-Back Handling – Use software to automatically handle bounced messages and remove subscribers after five bounced messages.
   
   
10. List Segmentation – Target the most profitable customers on your list and send different messages based on list criteria. Let the software do the legwork for you!

So there you have it – awareness is the key. Send out your e-mailer, make sure it reaches, track and analyse its performance, and manage your subscriber list effectively, and you will see a visible impact on your business!