One of the often overlooked factor when creating a digital footprint for a small business is quality web hosting. A reliable web hosting solution is no doubt a basic requirement for all entities seeking to establish a rewarding online presence.
Often times, most people conclude that costlier means better, and so they settle for international web hosting providers. But this is not always true.
Professional web developers and programmers will agree that as far as web hosting for small business is concerned, how costly the web hosting package or company is doesn’t always translate to top most quality.
From experience, we come to realize that not all international hosting spending huge sum on marketing to put themselves on the radar meet up to their customer expectation in terms of performance.
We’ve had clients who hurried away from a popular international web hosting provider after 4 of their websites was hacked and compromised with the web hosting.
We moved them to a Nigerian web hosting provider that we use, and they’ve not experience such issues in the past 24 months that they’ve been with the local provider.
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Reasons and Benefits to use a local web hosting service
There are several benefits you stands to gain as a small business owner when you opt for the service of a local web hosting provider.
In this post, we will pinpoint a few mind-blowing reasons small business owners should settle for local web hosting providers.
1. Speed
Most Local web hosting providers strive to offer speed loading server performance, especially ones that have their data centers in close proximity. This will help to to content delivery system to be faster due to the shorter distance data has to travel before being served to wen users.
This efficiently means that your web pages will be load faster for web visitors. A fast-loading website has a way of helping your SEO, several online surveys points that slow loading pages is one the major reasons a web visitors will decide to leave a website.
Efficient loading web pages will help to also enhance user experience, increase time spent by visitors on web pages, reduces bounce rates, and boost your chances of converting prospective customers to paying customers.
2. Pricing
You’d agree with us that local web hosting providers have far more realistic and pocket-friendly prices compared to International providers where packages are priced in foreign currencies such as USD. We have earlier pointed that the prices of web hosting in most cases has nothing to do with the quality that you stands to get from a provider. So, local business owners should stop making this mistake.
As a professional web design company, we can tell from experience that the price of a web hosting provider is not one of the determining factors that we use to check the quality of service delivery.
With that said, local providers usually offer pocket-friendlier web hosting plans mostly tailored to the needs of local businesses and entities looking to get an online presence for their business on a budget.
3. Timely Support
Faster response time is another reason you should consider the using the service of a local web hosting service provider. You can expect to get better customer support and faster response times (but it’s not always the case will all providers as with international providers as well) however, there are both local and international providers that placed priorities in helping their clients solve their problem just-in-time and also making sure that they get the best from using their services.
Hence, we should clarified that timely support has nothing to do with a local provider, in other words, using a local or international provider doesn’t mean you’d get the best customer support. It’s why we always recommend that you do you do research when settling for the best web hosting company. Here is a comprehensive guide on what to look for when choosing a web hosting provider.
Another contributing factor is the time zone, local providers can offer you support services when you contact them during working or functioning hours, and issues are resolved promptly, the case may not be the same with international providers, because, even when you’re sure of the country the international hosting is, you can’t say the same for their customer service operatives which are usually contracted offshore
4. Tailored solutions
When you use the service of a web hosting provider in the same region as you, you can be sure you’re getting a service tailored to your business needs. Most local web hosting providers usually do their due diligence to uncover the needs of users in the industry, this will help them have a clear-cut perspective of what solutions are best for the local market.
One of the most obvious ones is providing support for local payment options and offering customer service in local languages. The recent changes in the CBN policy have caused a shakeup to using local bank cards for international payments, this may mean a lot of bottlenecks to businesses whose websites are hosted offshore, as they have to scamper for costlier payment alternative solutions such as using virtual cards to pay for their web hosting.
5. Data Privacy
Enhanced security compliance is another compelling reason to use the service of a local web hosting provider. They adhere to local data protection laws in their quest to offer better data privacy and security solutions for small business owners. Compliance with these regulations helps to ascertain that sensitive customer data remains secure, thus protecting the reputation of the business and fostering trust with customers and stakeholders.
6. Better SEO Ranking
Yes, a faster-loading website due to a more efficient Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a smaller user base can mean better performance in relative to SEO. We noted earlier that speed is one of the major factors contributing to poor SEO performance,
Local web hosting due to their smaller userbase are able to focus on getting an optimized server performance for their customers. Better website loading times are considered by search engines as a ranking factor, leading to better visibility on SERPs.
7. Economic Benefits
Economy-wise, patronizing a local provider plays a pivotal role in helping and strengthening the economy looking at how much small business owners contribute to the growth of the nation’s economy. Supporting local businesses will help to create more job opportunities, help in wealth retention, strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem, keep the entrepreneur spirit and innovation culture, bring about community development initiatives that capably lead to improvement in infrastructure and overall quality of life of the people.
8. Uptime
Local web hosting providers maintain servers in local data centers to ensure client’s websites are up around the clock. This is achieved by regular server monitoring and maintenance services to minimize the risk of website downtime so that their clients can maintain an online presence that is consistent and one that provides uninterrupted access to their products and services 24/7.
9. Ease of Use
Mostly local providers understand the role of a simple User interface for their local providers, in light of this they seek to create user-friendly administrative interfaces and on-complicated web packages that is essentially tailored to small- to medium-sized websites.
These intuitive interfaces make it easier for small business owners who are less familiar with technical stuff like this to perform basic management task on their website They can do basic task like change nameservers, update content, off and on mod security, and make any necessary modifications without the need for extensive technical knowledge or expertise.
Finally, using the service of a web hosting provider in your home country can mean numerous advantages for you as a small business owner as explained above.
We have also written a previous guide on how to start web hosting business in Nigeria, which consists of all the required information you need to kickstart your own reseller web hosting company. If this is something you’d like to do, be sure to check out this guide.
Tell us what you think and your experience using a web hosting provider in your region, in the comment section below.
