3 negative consequences of bad hosting

A slow online store

You probably encountered it often. You are shopping online, click on a new page on the website and it takes an incredibly long time before it is loaded.

Really frustrating for you as a visitor.

It may not be that bad when having a good WIFI-connection or a landline, but for mobile connections like 3G or 4G, a slow-loading page can become really annoying with all consequences of that.

What consequences are there?

Visitors drop out

Visitors of your online store do not want to wait a long time for a certain page. If it takes too long, they drop out and visit a competitor’s page. And that’s the last thing you want.

According to Kissmetrics, 40 percent of the customers leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

Conversion loss

Various studies have proved that a slower loading online store results in less conversion and therefore, less turnover.

The already-mentioned Kissmetrics discovered that a delay of 1 second can lead to a reduction of 7% in conversion.

That’s a pretty expensive second.

For an e-commerce site that sells €10.000 a day this can be a crucial loss.

Possibly lower rankings in Search engines like Google

PageSpeed is an official ranking factor that Google added to the search algorithm.

Bad web hosting has a direct impact on the speed and performance of your website. Therefore it indirectly impacts your SEO results.

Recent research of Sparktoro has shown that page speed is ranked 12th as the most determining ranking factor at Google in 2019. This research has been executed among 1500 SEO-specialists.

Is findability in Google important for you? Don’t save money on hosting, but invest in it.

A poorly secured or slow server

Bad hosting often involves hosting on shared servers. We call this Shared Hosting.

Shared Hosting does not have to be a problem at all, small websites with little traffic can cope easily with Shared Hosting.

However, for successful websites that get a lot of traffic, Shared Hosting may not be a good idea.

With Shared Hosting, you share a server with other websites/online stores.

This means you make use of the same resources with a couple of websites/online stores. When ‘online store A’ needs a lot of resources on certain times (because there is a lot of traffic on the site), you may suffer from it as online store B, that also makes use of the same Shared server.

The extent to which this happens depends on the total resources available and the number of online stores on the same server.

When a web host does not offer top-level security and offers Shared Hosting, it can therefore happen that malware or viruses reach the server via another website.

And that is something, you don’t want at all!

Unnecessary long downtime

Bad hosting often goes hand in hand with cheaper hosting. This means that many web hosts prefer not to spend too much time on support or other things that prevent long downtime.

On Hipex servers, we have an up-time of 99,99%. And may your online store be down for whatever reason, our technical specialists are always ready to solve this (usually it is solved before you even noticed it).

This is often different with many other large web hosters. They are not available by phone at all and phone numbers are hidden as much as possible. Submitting a ticket or starting a chat is the only alternative.

Unnecessary time is wasted because every second that your website is down will probably cost you tons of money.

This is exactly why the right support and guidance is a point not to be underestimated when choosing the right web hosting.

Are you going for cheap, but bad hosting?

The negative consequences we outline above are real. If you have a website where short or medium periods of downtime are not a problem, site speed is not crucial and conversions are less important. You can easily handle less-quality hosting.

Because the main negative consequences of bad hosting are:

• Less turnover (due to fewer visits and a low conversion)
• Badly secured and slow server
• Bad support and therefore longer downtime

Want to have everything arranged well for your online store? Don’t just choose a cheap Shared Hosting plan from any web hoster.

Be critical, ask questions and don’t save money on web hosting. This is the foundation of your online success.