Every business website requires different functionalities to meet its specific needs. Fortunately, a wide variety of popular web apps make it easier for businesses to add specific capabilities to their websites. However, finding the right web hosting provider to host these apps can go a long way toward maximizing their effectiveness. Once you’ve determined which web apps need to be included on your business’s website, you then need to focus on finding a web hosting provider that can support those specific apps.
Popular Apps and their Web Hosting Requirements
Although each business must decide which web apps will help them meet their goals, looking at a few examples could illustrate why it’s so important to pick the right web hosting service.
Bravo Video is an app that allows businesses to capture and display customer testimonial videos, helping establish their credibility with prospective customers in the future. A website that includes a lot of videos would need a web host with lots of processing power in order to run smoothly.
Running a business email service like Microsoft Exchange also raises a lot of other web hosting concerns. Opting for a hosted Exchange environment can provide cost savings and greater automation, but hosting Exchange with an unreliable provider may end up creating more trouble than it’s worth.
Finally, WePay is an app that provides a free and easy way for businesses to collect funds from their customers online. Although WePay provides their own secure, embedded solution, it’s important to have a provider that can ensure the safety of your customer’s payment information if you’re going to be collecting payments over the Internet.
Picking the Right Web Host
These are just a few examples of the types of apps you may use while building your website. In reality, you’ll probably have many more than this, so finding a web hosting provider that can handle a wide variety of apps with no downtime is essential. Make a list of providers that have a history of working well with small businesses and then conduct a comparison to find out what each one offers for the price you’d be paying.
Web hosting is becoming more affordable all the time, so there’s no reason you should have to pay a huge bill every month just to get reliable web hosting. At the same time, price shouldn’t be the only consideration that enters into your decision. Going with a bargain service could cost you in the long run if that host isn’t able to keep up with your traffic or support customer conversions by providing seamless interactions.
Being honest about your business needs from a web hosting provider is the first and most important step toward selecting the right one. If you don’t know what you need, how could you be surprised when you don’t end up getting it? A good web host can keep your online presence running smoothly now and support it as it grows in the future.