Three of the key ingredients for the success of a brick-and-mortar business have always been location, location and location. Remarkably, it turns out this is true for e-businesses as well.
Your domain host can have a significant impact upon your ability to do business. Along with your domain name registration, where you decide to call your ecommerce site home is an essential aspect of its performance.
With that in mind, here are three domain hosting red flags of which you should be aware.
If The Deal Sounds Too Good to Be True
Unlimited bandwidth for only five cents per month? Yeah, let’s see how long that one holds up. If they’re making next to no money, how can they deliver reliable service?
They’re probably offering all sorts of things that should be included in the base price on an a la carte basis to compensate. By the time they’re done nickel and diming, you may have had an all-inclusive package for less money—with fewer headaches.
Know what services you need and do the math before you sign.
Indifferent Customer Service
When you call with a problem do you get through to someone knowledgeable right away? Are you left on hold for an interminable duration, only to get a rote response like “Did you try rebooting your computer?”
Granted, there are times when that might indeed be the solution, but why should you have to wait on hold for 30 minutes for someone to ask you that?
A far better solution would be to offer a variety of methods for you to get help; email, chatbots, a robust forum etc. By the way, problems also happen in the middle of the night, in the middle of the weekend, during a holiday.
Will they have a living, breathing individual available to whom you can speak?
Negative Buzz
Ideally, you’ll spend some time investigating the reputation of a provider before handing responsibility for your public presence over to them. Online reviews, forums, social media, Yelp and other peer review sites are good places to start your due diligence.
Yes, everybody is bound to have one or two negative reviews; after all, it’s nigh unto impossible to please everyone all the time. But if the preponderance of buzz is bad, seek another destination.
Slow Load Times
Get a list of the sites the host currently serves and observe their performance using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
If you’re seeing lackluster speed across all of their sites (and you can bet they’ll give you the fastest ones to review) they have a problem in that regard.
These days, most users will give your site a maximum of three seconds to load.
After that, they’ll look for another source. If you’ve done everything you can to maximize the performance of your site, only to be potentially let down by your host, we suggest you do the same.
Spotting these domain hosting red flags will enable you to deliver faster, more reliable service, which translates into a better experience and more loyalty from your users. To enjoy the best web hosting, domain search tools and more, visit Yahoo Small Business today!
