Haunted Website Hosting

Unfortunately, not all hosting is created equal. There’s fast, reliable hosting that supports your website well, then there’s cheap hosting that acts more like a vampire – it sucks the life out of your website and dooms it to be this half-dead thing that never really sees the light of day. So how can you tell if your current hosting is vampiric?

Here are 3 signs your website hosting sucks!

1. Your Website Loads Slower Than A Zombie March
2. Your Website Keeps Respawning 
3. Your Website Has Been Left To Run Wild 

1. Your Website Loads Slower Than A Zombie March

According to zombie.fandom.com, zombies are defined as “slow-moving, minimally cognitive predators who are technically dead and suffer from natural decay” . Now imagine this is your website 😱

A bit of a far-fetched analogy, I know, but stay with me.

Since 2006, we’ve seen some amazing websites that just plod along like a pack of hungry zombies for no apparent reason. Once we dig a little deeper, it is often because the old hosting is what’s slowing everything down.

Without going into too much technical nitty gritty, website hosting speed can be attributed to these main 3 things:

• Hard drive type | Solid State Drives (SSDs) or Hard Disk Drives (HDDs),
• RAM | Random Access Memory (RAM) i.e. amount of storage your web host provides to store your scripts, and
• Bandwidth | How much data your web host can transfer
  

This explains why we’ve found most cheaper hosting solutions so disappointing. Often called Shared Hosting, these cheaper options are exactly that… Shared. You’re effectively sharing the above resources, which are already quite limited to keep the price down, with any number of other websites. All of you are stored on the same server/s.

When one or more websites are already drawing heavily on these resources your website, along with others, all slow down and can even appear glitchy if things are not loading quite right.

2. Your Website Keeps Respawning

This is a bit like characters in a video game that are killed off then come back to life, over and over again. Bad quality hosting often results in a website dropping dead, then coming back to life multiple times a week or even multiple times a day. While very few website hosting providers can guarantee a genuine 100% uptime all year round, too much downtime does have a scary flow-on effect.

Hosting companies that promise 95% uptime might sound very reasonable, however, the hosting downtime table below tells a very different story. 95% uptime still equates to your website being unavailable for 18.25 days per year. That’s an entire business day per week. Imagine the amount of website traffic, not to mention, sales/bookings you could be missing out on here. Then there’s Google. According to delante.co “While short outages do not affect your site’s ranking, extended outages will get your site de-indexed. A few days is all it takes for Google to not register your site favourably anymore, with even longer downtimes having even more disastrous effects. Even a downtime of six hours can negatively impact your site’s ranking!”

3. Your Website Has Been Left To Run Wild 

Hosting and websites that aren’t being managed run the risk of going rogue. Like an abandoned building starts to fall apart, a website left unmonitored and never updated will inevitably suffer from digital decay. From broken images and links, software conflicts, unchecked hacks and generally being out of date, websites that are not being professionally managed eventually develop issues.

How Good Quality Managed Hosting Is The Answer

Managed Hosting combines both your;

1. Physical Website Storage | The actually server space where your website files are stored, and
2. Your Site’s Constant Monitoring | Usually combining both third-party monitoring software and physical human/s intervention, this is your website performance and security monitoring plus updates and maintenance.

Managed Hosting is like having your own IT technician or website manager. They can not only take care of the technical aspects of your website, they can also upload new blog articles, update old information and photos as well as adjust the design over time to help keep your website looking fresh.