Some of the biggest problems we see are connected to our clients’ website hosting. Sure, there are multitudes of other problems that can affect your business, but at the end of the day, many of your troubles come down to your hosting. Most business owners are surprised by this and are often caught short when their site goes down, losing customers and money in huge amounts.
One of the more common problems happened to one of our old clients. We built a website for them about eight years ago (which we don’t do any more), and they came to us looking for a backup copy of their website. I had to tell them that we don’t keep backups for that length of time. The reason they needed a backup was that their hosting company lost their entire website. Their host company claimed their files were corrupted and there was no way for them to retrieve the site. Their entire business disappeared overnight.
One of the first things we do with hosting is to make sure it’s secure, and to create safe backups. We’ve had clients who were hacked, keeping their site offline for days. Having a backup site will allow you to get back to business much faster.
Where you keep your backup is almost as important. Our hacked client unfortunately had their backup on the same server as their site. Your backups should always be on a remote server somewhere separate from your main site.
Another problem with hosts is that some of them haven’t yet switched to HTTP 2 yet. Basically, this makes your site awesomely fast. If your host hasn’t yet switched, you’re leaving money on the table. Look on Google for http/2 check to find out if your host is up to date.
This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.
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Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
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