Last Updated on June 12, 2018 by Larious

When you are first getting a startup business off the ground, there are so many different things you need to worry about. For example, getting the right premises or office space, purchasing the relevant equipment and technology, all the legal stuff like registering your company and tax etc. Then you also need to think about how you are going to get customers, as that is obviously a very important part of any successful business.

There are a number of different marketing methods and some suit certain types of businesses more than others but one highly effective marketing strategy is digital marketing. A huge percentage of consumers now use the internet as their first port of call when searching for a business or a specific type of service. In fact, statistics show that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making big purchases.

So for any startup, having a strong digital marketing strategy should be a key priority. Of course, the biggest element of a digital marketing strategy is to have a website set up for your business. People might be able to find you on Facebook or other social media platforms but you will definitely attract more organic business if you have a website.

If setting up a website is a bit alien to you but you don’t fancy paying huge amounts of money for a web designer then you might want to consider doing it yourself. You can use a website builder or a preformatted template to make things easier if you are not experienced in this area.

One factor that you should be thinking about is the hosting company. A web host is basically the service that you need to enable your website to be online. A host provides space on a server for your website to run from. But it isn’t really a simple case of just picking a host and paying a fee for the service. There are many different types of hosts out there providing different types of features and different levels of service. So to make things easier for you, we have picked out 3 main things to look out for:

1. Table of Contents

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   Customer reviews

To build up an unbiased view of how a company performs and how their customers rate them, customer reviews are really helpful. On a hosting company’s own website, they are promoting their services so they are not going to highlight any weaknesses. To get an idea of how they really perform, find out from those who know best – their past and current customers. You can also get reviews from trusted tech experts, although you should make sure that the reviewer is impartial and doesn’t have an affiliation with the company it provides a glowing review for!

2. Performance

A good web host should support your website by providing high levels of performance. The page loading speed in particular, plays a huge part in conversion rates. Did you know for example, that 40% of shoppers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load? Slow loading websites are really annoying to visitors, so make sure that your host is able to provide superfast loading speeds.

You also want to find a hosting company that provides a high percentage of Uptime, which is basically the time that your website will be online. Anther big frustration for users is being directed to a site that is down for maintenance or through a technical fault. So look for a hosting company that offers a very high guaranteed percentage of Uptime like 99.999%.

3. Customer support

If you ever have the misfortune to experience a technical nightmare when your website goes down at a critical moment or something on your website breaks and you can’t fix it, customer support will hopefully be able to save you. Different hosts have very different approaches to their customer service offerings, so check out their available hours and channels of support. You will be able to find ratings for most company’s customer support, so do your research so that you don’t have to find out the hard way that their customer support is terrible!