We’ve been helping clients with their digital marketing needs for over 7 years now, and we’ve come to learn that it doesn’t matter how strong your marketing strategy,copywriting, web design or SEO is; they’re not going to work if the proper foundations aren’t in place first.
Web hosting is one of those foundation pieces, and yet it’s something many of us don’t carefully consider when buying. You might opt for the cheapest one, the most popular one or the one you got a discount code for without really taking the time to explore how good that web hosting is, and if it’s going to support or actually hinder your website and marketing success.
What makes a good web host?
From a marketing perspective, we look for the following:
Fast server response times – Google takes page loading speeds seriously, as do your audience. If your page is slow to load, your visitors will click back to Google search results and Google will drop your ranking
Local server – one of the factors that affects server response times is where the server is based. If you’re a UK based business using cheap hosting from America, it’s likely the server your website is hosted on in the US. This means it takes longer for your website to load for UK audiences. You should have your website hosted on a server in a country your audience are resident in.
Global CDN – one of the ways to improve page loading speeds and overcome the local server issue is by using a global content delivery network, such as Cloudflare. CDNs will cache copies of your website on different servers around the world and serve up the one closest to your visitor’s IP address.
Adequate bandwidth – a lot of the cheaper web hosts/packages set limits on your bandwidth and maybe even throttle it at peak times. The last thing you want is find your website is slow and unresponsive during Black Friday because of the high traffic on that shared server, so you need to be confident your website can handle traffic at all times.
Good customer support – when you run into issues you want to know that you’re speaking to someone that cares, is non-judgemental and able to help you resolve the problem.
GDPR compliant – GDPR and Data Protection is becoming increasingly important, so you need to be sure that the server and company you’re hosting client data with is GDPR compliant.
Unfortunately, we’ve come across two main issues with our clients – they’re paying a tiny amount each month and not getting everything on this priority list, or they are getting everything but they’re paying a hefty sum for it.
Another common problem for our clients is the set-up and migration phase. They’re unsure how to install a website on their hosting, how to set up emails, how to point nameservers for their domain name, etc (it can be a bit of a technical nightmare!)
Launching Zebra Web Hosting
We often found ourselves stepping in as middlemen for our clients, having access to their web hosting, namecheap, etc and liaising with these companies on their behalf to get things done. We thought “there must be a better way of doing this?”. And there is.
Zebra Web Hosting allows us to sell web hosting directly to our clients, get things set up exactly as our clients need it using bespoke packages to suit them, install WordPress, set up emails, connect the domain name and install an SSL certificate to keep things secure.
In a nutshell, we can ensure that you’re getting the best web hosting possible, based in the UK, that we know will help you get the results you’re looking for with your digital marketing efforts. Oh, and we don’t charge a fortune for it either – our packages start from £4.99 a month with our most expensive package £9.99 per month.
Zebra Web Hosting is:
- UK based with a global CDN
- Has lightning-fast server response times
- Generous SSD space and bandwidth allowances (unlimited in some cases)
- GDPR compliant
- Eco-friendly – our hosting is carbon neutral
- Fantastic support
- Free SSL certificates as standard
- Secure email hosted on your own hosting (so you can finally ditch Gmail!)
Who can buy Zebra Web Hosting?
At the moment, we’re only opening up web hosting to our old, new and existing clients. Having our own web hosting is a big step for us and we want to make sure we’re getting things right before we consider making it available to everyone.
Eventually, we do plan to offer Zebra Web Hosting to anyone that needs a trusted and reliable web host, but we’re not quite there yet! This is likely to be available from the end of 2022 onwards, so do check back then!
How can I buy Zebra Web Hosting?
Because we want to make sure you’re getting the best web hosting for your needs, we’re creating bespoke packages tailored to you. So, drop us a line and we’ll be in touch to discuss things further with you!
It doesn’t matter if you only bought a web design or optimisation service from us two years ago and we haven’t heard from you since, so long as you have used Zebra Business Solutions in the past (or are planning to in the future), we’d be happy to work with you.
