Everybody obsesses about the design of their website, but in my experience, most people don’t give the same level of attention to hosting.
There are probably many good reasons for this. Hosting is the final step in getting your website live, and often, in the rush to do so, people just agree to any hosting package that’s presented to them.
The reality is that your hosting can make or break your website, so ensuring it’s properly hosted on an optimised server is crucial to the site’s success.
Cheap hosting that is not up to the job of hosting your small business website can be one of the main reasons your website never ranks for the search terms or queries you hope it will.
Many small businesses then invest in SEO, thinking it will solve the problem, but the underlying problem is that the website’s hosting account is crappy, cheap, and slow.
It only takes a few seconds.
You probably visit your website all the time, so whatever browser you’re using has cached it deeply, which is why it loads really quickly. The problem here is that you don’t really get a realistic idea of your website’s loading times from a visitor who’s never visited it before.
If they have to wait 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load, they’re going to bounce back to the search results; the data proves this.
This simple fact could be costing your small B2B business thousands of pounds a year in missed opportunities.
This is why we recommend hosting your WordPress business website with an agency that not only provides hosting but also provides WordPress services.
What does a WordPress agency bring to the party when it comes to WordPress hosting?
Hosting isn’t just the box your website lives on. There are many other factors that come into play. One of which is optimising the hosting, and another important one is optimising the website.
If you put a poorly built WordPress site on a quality host, the hosting can only do so much to mitigate the bad quality of the build.
If you put a well-built and optimised WordPress site on some cheap hosting account, the quality of the WordPress build can only do so much to mitigate the lack of quality in the hosting.
An agency that builds WordPress sites can cover both of these factors.
- They can make sure your WordPress site is fully optimised.
- They can ensure your hosting is fully optimised.
There’s a balance to be achieved between these two factors, and whilst hosting support teams are often quite knowledgeable about hosting, they don’t necessarily know about WordPress.
If you’ve been hosting your business website for some time, you’ll no doubt have spoken to a hosting support tech who simply tells you that any issue with site speed should be referred back to your developer (rather than being a hosting issue).
As a small business owner, this puts you right in the middle of two things that are probably outside of your skill set: WordPress development and optimisation, and the technical aspects of hosting.
I hear this all the time from clients: they’ve set up some cheap hosting account with GoDaddy, and the site is as slow as a snail. But when they reach out to GoDaddy support, they just get pushed back to their developer.
If the developer’s not up to scratch, there’s a good chance they’ll turn around and say it’s a problem with the hosting. You just get stuck in this endless dance, and nothing gets sorted out.
This is where WordPress hosting provided by a WordPress agency is worth the small investment
I’ve been hosting websites for nearly 30 years. Because my agency also looks after over 150 WordPress sites, we’ve got experience across every different type of hosting company you can think of.
I’ve worked with some of the big players, such as WP Engine, who genuinely provide excellent hosting, through to some of the more niche, environmentally friendly hosting companies, who can also be quite good, and the other big names, such as GoDaddy, HostGator, TwentyI, and so on, who, quite frankly, are all box shifters.
It’s important to remember that just because you read a review about hosting, it doesn’t mean that that review is correct.
Many of the box-shifter hosting companies, including GoDaddy, 20i, Hostinger, and HostGator, spend ridiculous amounts on advertising, including paying loads of hosting affiliate websites to tell you their hosting is the best.
As we host over 130 websites and provide support for a further 150, many of which are not hosted by us, we know hosting
this is one of the main reasons why using a WordPress agency to also host your site makes good sense. Sure, you’re going to pay a premium. It is going to be slightly more expensive than if you go to some pile-it-high sell-it-cheap hosting company, but you really do get what you pay for.
We host with reputable companies that all use Google’s data centres in London. Our hosting starts at an affordable £35 plus VAT per month, which is less than a mobile phone contract, so when clients say it’s a bit expensive, it’s not actually expensive at all. It’s just that you’ll always be able to find it cheaper, and this is the trap that many people fall into.
This is your business
If you provide other businesses with services or productize services or products that they can buy online, your website is your business.
At Toast, we generate 100% of our new business leads via organic SEO, optimised WordPress websites, and seriously good hosting.
Over the last 30 years, we could have saved a significant amount of money by hosting our own business websites on cheap hosting; we did that in the early days and learned our lesson.
Given how hard small business owners work and how important your website is, or potentially can be, to your business, it’s one of the main reasons we bang on about hosting so much to our clients; you’ve already taken the risk of setting up your own business, you’ve gone to the time and expense of putting a website together, you’ve written all the content for the website and spent time optimising it, so please don’t throw it all away on the final straight by hosting your website on a £5/month service.
Other benefits of using a WordPress agency to host your site
More clout
At Toast, we have agency-level accounts with the hosting companies we work with. I’m not going to tell you exactly how much we spend on hosting a year, but it’s a lot more than £40,000 across our various accounts.
This means that our hosting companies listen to us. We have monthly calls with our dedicated team at WP Engine, and our other hosting companies genuinely listen to us.
It might be unfortunate, but it’s a fact that the more money you spend with a supplier, the more they listen to you. As a B2B business, you’ll know this yourself: you’ll have clients that spend a lot of money with you each month, these people are your important clients, and you listen to them: you even go out of your way to keep them happy.
A simple reality here is that we get premium support, advanced technicians, and deals and services from the hosting companies we work with that you simply don’t get if you host a site with them for £30 a month
We get direct access to service support teams who are at the top level, not call centres or chatbots that you end up battling with to try and get a problem solved – so when you host with us, you directly benefit from our scale, you’re not a single small business hosting a single WordPress site.
You’re represented by Toast, which hosts hundreds of sites across multiple servers, so you get premium support.
Direct access
You don’t phone the hosting company if something goes wrong on your website. You call us, and we pick up within 5 rings.
This means we can quickly check whether it is indeed a hosting problem or a WordPress problem. If you’ve got a single hosting account with a box-shifting hosting company, you’re going to join a long queue or wait forever battling with a chatbot.
We get on the issue right away, and if it is indeed a hosting-related problem, we can be chatting with their support within a matter of minutes.
A more personalised service
If there’s a problem with your website and you host with us, you’re going to speak to a team that knows you, knows your business, and knows your website.
This reduces the time required to fix things and just makes everything much less of a headache.
On top of this, it means that you also know us. All Toast hosting clients know each team member directly. They know who to speak to about what type of problem, and this means that there’s a relationship there that can’t simply exist with a box-shifter when you never speak to the same person more than once.
Credentials
As we have significant hosting accounts, we also have corresponding credentials. We’re a WordPress engine agency partner and an automatic partner via our hosting accounts with Pressable.
Now do the one thing you can’t do with nearly all large hosting providers.
Have a conversation. If you’d like to talk to Toast about hosting your website, you can call Dave directly on 01295 266644.
If you can spare 20 minutes, he’ll talk you through our hosting and wider services, and how we can help your website win more new business.
If you prefer an online meeting, you can book one below:
David Foreman
Dave is a seasoned WordPress pro, having worked with the platform for over 15 years. He helps small business owners win more new business from their websites by planning them, designing them, building them, and hosting them properly.
