When it comes to building a website, there are myriad ways in which businesses large and small attempt to cut corners to save on costs. Perhaps it’s taking the do-it-yourself route and working from an inexpensive or free template; perhaps it’s enlisting a code-savvy friend to construct the site at a reduced cost; perhaps it’s something more minor, such as using royalty-free stock images instead of original content or foregoing the services of a professional content writer and instead crafting the words in house.
No matter the size and scope of your website and no matter the importance it holds for your business, one mistake that no doubt countless people regret skimping on is the crucial element of good and effective hosting. Indeed, nothing can be more detracting to a visitor than lethargic page load times, snail-like check-out services, videos that take forever to play and so on. And when a frustrated potential customer navigates away from your page for any of these reasons, they’re taking their money—and their potential referrals and recommendations—with them.
As important as a fast-moving website—complements of fast-moving hosting—can be to your client and customer base, so to can it benefit the administrators of a site. Business, as they say, often moves at the speed of light, and being able to make quick and easy changes to your site—adding important text, tweaking product descriptions and pricing or merely making a tiny correction—thanks to solid hosting translates to effective productivity as well as a lack of website downtime and the rigors of outright frustration.
If you’re currently unhappy with the speed provided by your hosting company, the first thing you should consider is moving to a solid-state drive (or SSD) platform. SSDs save data on linked flash memory chips, meaning they can read and transfer data at nearly three times the rates of more conventional hard-disk drives (HDD). While this may not seem important on the surface, consider this: research shows that a delay of only four seconds in the loading of a virtual “shopping cart” translates into a 20 percent loss in sales.
SSDs are also vastly more reliable: when an HDD reaches the end of it’s usable life, it often does so very quickly, and valuable data can be lost forever in the blink of an eye. SSDs, however, retain the data already written on them by simply preventing new data from being written over top. And SSDs are also more eco-friendly, as they consume less energy than the traditional spinning drive of an HDD—80 percent less power by current estimates.
If you’re working with a private website developer or even a large or small firm, there’s a good chance they offer SSD hosting on their own platform or can, at the very least, refer you to reputable source. Either way, fast hosting through an SSD—which is virtually the same cost as slower HDD—has benefits that should be seriously considered: a more pleasant browsing experience for your customers, which can easily equal increased sales, and an easier updating process for yourself or your website administrator. In the end, the sum product is a better bottom line for your business.
Creating Digital Destinations that Build Communities and Change Lives.
Our non-profit clients consistently tell us their biggest challenges are improving donor engagement and promoting their mission online. At Byte Technology, we understand that creating a successful online presence for non-profits isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” undertaking. By choosing the right tools for your organization, Byte Technology can help you create online strategies that foster engagement with your volunteers, patrons and donors specifically—allowing you the capability to build stronger relations with the people that matter to your organization most.
Learn more about Byte Technology’s high-speed web hosting for nonprofits.
