The crisis created by the pandemic can also be a chance for a change in business models. As they say, where the difficulties lie, the opportunities lie. An optimistic idea to understand this problem as a warning that businesses (large and small) need a digital transformation to adapt to the new era and be able to prosper in an increasingly competitive world. And that happens by giving online visibility to the business, for which you will need web hosting, or have a corporate email service.
All the new technologies. They are here to stay and the health crisis has made it clear that they are essential for the world to continue its activity. For example, it has been seen that some sectors have been able to adapt to telework and save the situation, while others have had to close down. Therefore, whether to adopt these new technologies or not can be the line that separates a business from success or failure.
Without going any further, the commerce and hospitality sector itself has seen the need to use this type of digital platforms to survive. Some stores and restaurants that have not been able to open their doors to the public have continued to bring their products to their customers through websites and using home delivery services. But this could be applicable to almost any company or freelance ...
So, you should consider enjoying all these advantages and this new dimension that will allow you to expand beyond physical limits. Something so essential that Europe has allocated, through its recovery plan, a huge amount of money to provide companies with this competitive advantage in order to quickly emerge from the crisis.
What do I need web hosting for?
Un hosting or web hosting it is nothing more than a space on a server to host your own web page. In this way, the website will be available online to promote your services, offer an online sales platform (e-commerce), etc.
These services avoid having to have own server. This would mean high expenses to acquire the hardware, consumption, and maintenance. In addition, the bandwidth of your home or office network would not have the adequate features to support the traffic that some of these online platforms usually support.
When you hire a web hosting service, you simply pay a fixed monthly fee that is quite inexpensive. In exchange for that, you can start enjoying them all the advantages that it can bring you:
- Good performance compared to setting up your own home server, since you will have the advantages of the data center of the provider with which you contract the service.
- Greater flexibility compared to self-hosting sites like Blogger or similar. For example, having your own domain with the identity of your company or brand.
- Have your own platform. It could be from a simple WordPress blog to give greater visibility to what you do or to monetize it, or a corporate website to promote your brand or service, an e-commerce site for online sales, a landing page, a site to bring together your community or clients, a web app to provide some kind of online service, Wikis to offer better help and documentation for your products, etc.
- Increase the reach of your business. You will not only reach those in your area or neighborhood, you can also reach many other national and even international clients. In addition, in case of restrictions, it would not be affected, since you could continue to operate online.
- Could even run 24/7 with virtually no supervision.
- Improve your brand image, especially if the design of your website is adequate and shows all the potential you have to offer.
- Can allow you save on expenses if your business is 100% online, since you will not have to rent a physical location, or pay electricity, water bills, etc.
- You can use tools from statistics analysis and data graphs to be able to evaluate how sales, visits, etc. are going, allowing adequate measures to be taken.
- You put it on easier for your customers, they will not have to travel to request your services. They can do it comfortably from the sofa, which improves customer loyalty.
What are the advantages of having a professional email service?
Many web hosting services also include some extras that can allow you to have your own professional email. That is, a corporate email with different addresses for each of the members of your business, if necessary, and with their own domain. This gives customers a much better image compared to the use of Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo accounts, etc.
When you see that a company or business usually has that type of email can feel unprofessional. For example, with a professional and secure email service from IONOS, you can have an address type user@company-name.es.
This is much more professional and transmits greater confidence to your users and clients. In addition, if the company is made up of several people, you can create different emails, such as administracion@company-name.es, sales@empersa-name.es, contacto@company-name.es, support@company-name.es, etc. A way to offer your customers the right direction to go according to what they need.
On the other hand, beyond the image of responsibility and professionalism, it is also positive to have this type of corporate email to circumvent certain restrictions or limitations of free emails for personal use. And, of course, you will have greater possibilities to configure the parameters according to your needs, such as improve security with custom anti-spam filters, add antivirus, schedule automatic responses, add headers or digital signatures, etc.
How to choose the right web hosting according to your needs
If you have decided to take the leap and modernize your business by hiring a web host, you can follow these tips for you to make a good choice:
- Type of web hosting: There are several types of services, such as:
- Shared hosting: It is usually a very cheap service, but it has a disadvantage in terms of performance, since your website will be hosted together with hundreds or thousands of other clients.
- Dedicated: it is the opposite of the previous one, and it is a physical server exclusively for you. This provides greater performance, and total control over it. But it is more expensive and would only make sense for large sites or with many visits.
- VPS: virtual private servers are something in between the previous two. What is done is to divide the physical server into parcels or virtual machines, dedicating each of these parcels to an exclusive client. What you get is a cheap service like the shared one, but with better benefits. Today, they are often the favorites of many.
- Cloud hosting: It is a kind of distributed hosting, hosted in the cloud on different servers, instead of just one like the previous ones. This can be somewhat more complex, and costly. But, in return, you can get better stability, since if a server crashes, you can remain stable.
- Hardware and system: whether it is a bare-metal server or a VPS, you should look at the features it offers and the details. Something that will depend a lot on your needs, since not all users need the same thing. However, if you opt for a more modest service, you can always upgrade to a higher one if you need to. On the other hand, do not be optimistic and hire a service that is too basic if you expect a decent user rate, as it can affect performance and could scare your customers away due to lack of fluency, waiting, etc. For instance:
- See if you have a good amount of CPU cores (or vCPU), if you have a good amount of RAM, which will directly affect performance.
- If you have SSD hard drives faster than HDDs, as well as their storage capacity.
- Limitations on data transfer, which should be unlimited to avoid monthly, weekly or daily restrictions like some services.
- The operating system, which must be stable, robust and secure like Linux.
- Security- Pay particular attention to the security features offered by the services. The more robust this section is, the calmer you will be. Also, if it has features like automatic backup, so much the better. For example, see if they have SSL certificates, if they have a firewall, protection software, anti-spam and antivirus filters for their mail service, etc.
- Extras: if in addition to accommodation and good benefits it also offers you other extra services for the same price, much better. For example, the possibility of registering your own domain (and subdomains), email service, wizard for the automated installation of CMS platforms (WordPress, Wiki, Moodle, PrestaShop, Drupal, ..), or a good control panel to manage intuitively everything you need.
- Technical service: you should have a good technical service with assistance in Spanish and 24/7, to be able to consult and solve your problems at any time.