There are many benefits to faster hosting for your business. These include higher conversion rates, lower exit rates, improved SEO and an overall better user experience. Speed can also be highly important to your success, especially if your website provides real-time data, uses VOIP or streams media.
However, many people are unsure of how to get faster hosting for their site. Here are a few tips on how to achieve this:
1. Consider Location
The location of a server can play an important role in the speed of your hosting. Finding a data centre (similar to those owned by Walt Coulston in Australia) that is close to your users will improve page load times and increase the responsiveness of applications. This means there is a lower delay and no lag. These are crucial to a number of different aspects of a website, including gaming and VOIP. If your website uses either of these, then location is an important factor to consider.
2. Network Latency
Although location is important, it does not necessarily mean that you will have the best response time. Therefore, when you are choosing your hosting provider, it is important to ask them about latency and what they do to reduce this. Find out whether they invest in things such as good engineers, quality hardware and regular maintenance. These will all contribute to increasing speed and reducing latency. It is also worth inquiring about any planned improvements to their service.
3. Use the Best Hardware
To be successful, you will need to find a good balance between performance and budget. To get the balance right, you will need to understand your resource needs. When you choose a hosting bundle, you may find that you do not have enough of the resources you actually need and you have too many resources that you don’t. So, when you are choosing a bundle, it is essential that you understand which of the resources included will help you achieve faster hosting to make sure you choose the right package for you.
4. Use Content Delivery Network Services
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) service is a great way to optimize content delivery. They increase load times and reduce latency by caching your static content and serving it from locations around the world that depend on the location of your users. If you have a limited budget, then this is one of the most cost-effective ways to make improvements to your hosting speed.
5. Bandwidth and Traffic
Hosting providers usually offer a range of different packages and each of these will have different things included in the bundle. Many packages include costs for both bandwidth and traffic, although this is not always clear and you may find that prices are misleading. It is important to check this out. Talk to providers and compare prices (don’t forget to use hosting coupon codes) to make sure that you get the right package that balances your bandwidth and traffic needs to improve your hosting speed, but also fits within your budget. One option is to ask if you can choose a cheaper bundle and then pay for add-ons to these services.
Whether you’re looking for dedicated, shared or virtual private server hosting, speed is important to the overall success of your website. By taking these tips into consideration, you should find that your hosting speed improves and contributes to a better user experience and the overall success of your business.
[Image source: Google Images]
You know I kind of wonder about the location thing sometimes. Lately when I visit a European website it seems to load very slow. I know there is some distance involved, but you would think in most cases it would still load decent. One in particular that I recall is the BBC news site. Every time I go there it is noticeably slow.
Now most of my user base is in the U.S., and that is where my hosting is, but it does make me wonder if someone from Europe or another part of the world visit my site is it noticeably slow for them? I guess there are a number of other things to consider like the visitors actual internet connection speed and such.
They keep talking about how we will have 1GBit per second speeds here in the future, but it’s not happening very fast. You have to live in or around a larger city just to get 10+ MBits per second for a decent speed.
3 second site speed can cause abandonment of websites. Great insights here Peter. “Finding a data centre that is close to your users will improve page load times and increase the responsiveness of applications. ” –I didn’t know the distance also affects loading speed.