The thing about solopreneurs who run their business either from a home office or a small rented office is that they need streamlined processes to avoid getting bogged down. While some undoubtedly operate alone and do not outsource any work at all, other entrepreneurs will make use of the global freelancing economy to remove the time-consuming or tedious tasks from their daily schedule.
Here are some considerations about web hosting that matter to many solopreneurs.
Managed Hosting
There are both managed hosting and unmanaged hosting plans. With managed hosting, everything is taken care of for the customer. The unmanaged ones tend to be a virtual private server (VPS) and dedicated server plans where superuser access is provided and the customer takes care of the server administration.
If you need hosting upgraded to something more powerful like a VPS or dedicated server, be sure that it’s the managed variety. This is important because even if the solopreneur has the technical know-how to manage the server themselves (perhaps they were a network administrator in a previous life), it shouldn’t be their main focus. You can find more information about managed hosting options at Hosting Kingdom.
Friendly, Knowledgeable Support
Busy business owners don’t have time to deal too much with support staff at the hosting company. They just need the website to work and not have much downtime. For this reason, a hosting company should offer help and advice in non-technical, layperson terms that aren’t a chore to understand.
Fast Hosting
For small business owners, losing a sale really matters. For this reason, sites shouldn’t be hosted on shared hosting plans to save a few dollars a month. It’s likely that a potential sale (or three) will be lost when the pages on the site fail to load quickly enough and the visitor hits the back button to go to your competitor.
Faster hosting using VPS or cloud hosting options, or at the very least a host that only uses solid-state drives instead of platter hard drives, is essential to deliver web pages fast enough to handle the site traffic successfully.
Content Delivery Networks
To get ahead of the competition, a solopreneur should also look for a content delivery network (CDN) as a feature of a hosting plan. A CDN is a network of servers across the U.S. and around the world that helps site visitors see the page sooner because it loads from a nearby web server and not miles away.
Some hosting plans include a CDN by default. There are different levels provided under the same CDN branding at times, so the business owner should consider which is the better one to have and consider paying extra if they have a larger site with lots of content or visitors are complaining about loading times.
Small business owners and especially solopreneurs are often pushed for time. They don’t have enough attention units to look at every detail on all aspects of their business. By choosing a better hosting plan with high-quality features, they avoid many of the pitfalls that beset business customers who only seek the cheapest hosting option available.
