Setting up and running a website can be a stressful task, regardless of who you are or what you do. From picking a design that pops, to analyzing your visits, clicks, and conversions, there is a mountain of tweaks and details to contend with if you want a return on your online investment. It’s easy to get lost in the multiplicity of options: buttons, styles, logos, methods for Facebook integration, surveys, plugins, and on and on. There are more gizmos and Tinker toys to play with than there are minutes in a day. But step back for a second and consider this: What use is a beautiful design, a great product, and phenomenal marketing if the platform that hosts it is, well… garbage? Listen, we aren’t in 2014 anymore. Everyone and their mom has a website created with the intent of establishing and maintaining a strong customer base and you are competing with them whether you like it or not. If you want to be successful on the web you need to be dynamic, you need to be secure, and you need to give your customers a first-class experience. So why on earth are you settling for “economy” hosting? It’s an understandable mistake really. When you signed up with your host, money was probably tight and you desperately wanted to get some online real estate that you could call yours. Not something with the impersonality of a Facebook page, but a real storefront; a stage to drum up publicity for your hard work. Then you just set it and forget it, which is easy to do when huge companies sell you for years at a time and auto-renew your subscriptions. But those few extra saved bucks a month come at a cost much greater than money; it can cost you opportunity. It could cost you your whole site. Let me put it this way: large hosting companies handle hundreds of thousands – if not more – websites on a daily basis. When you sign up with them, you become one of hundreds of thousands of clients. For eight dollars a month you get the privilege of getting dumped into a sea of other websites. Who are you going to call if you need to make a change? How are you going to feel when you hit hour two being on hold? As your business grows, you need to migrate to a more robust hosting platform. You need to go gold; you need managed hosting, and here’s why:
Four Reasons to Reconsider Economy Hosting
Economy website hosting is slow. Have you ever flown economy on a plane? You get to board last, all the luggage carriages are full before you even get on, and when you finally get to your seat you are greeted by a cramped and lonely chair-shaped coffin that you have the pleasure of sitting in for the next few hours. You can expect up to 8x the load time speed with managed hosting, which doesn’t sound like much at first, but consider waiting one second for a web page to load versus waiting eight seconds. That is a whole seven seconds during which a user could decide to click away. Not good.
If you are hacked, you could lose your website. If you have been anywhere close to a news source in the past year, you are more than aware that cybersecurity is a quickly-escalating concern. Is there any better target for a hack than an up-and-coming business with “economy-level” security? Again, your site is a drop in the bucket for massive hosting companies. If you find yourself at the business end of hundreds of malignant lines of code are you going to feel good about waiting in line to get taken care of? With economy hosting, your best option is a good recovery plan for when the inevitable happens. Is that really where you want to be?
There is no customization. Hosting is a complex and detailed system that changes based on a client’s needs. If you had to describe what your particular hosting experience needs to be, how many words do you think it would take? Two-hundred? A few sentences maybe? Possibly a paragraph or more? Well, when you pay for economy, you pay for four words: one size fits all. Would you show up to a meeting in a one size fits all suit? Yeah, me neither.
There is nobody to call. Need to talk to someone? Good luck. Pop some popcorn and throw on a movie because you are going to be sitting for a long while and I doubt you want to be alone with your thoughts for that. If you have a carrier pigeon on hand or know how to communicate by smoke signal you might even establish contact by the end of the week. The new buzzword in the industry is Managed Hosting. This refers to smaller hosting companies who offer personalized hosting services and real life humans that you can talk to.
Four Reasons to Switch to Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is faster. Living in the viral age is a wonderful thing, but only if you can take advantage of it. If your latest Facebook post draws three or four times as much traffic as you are used to seeing, is your site going to be able to hold up? Are you going to be able to ride the well-sought viral wave into the highest echelon of internet commerce? Orpheus carefully provisions its hosting servers with ample resources to support your traffic volume and hosts your site in the most mature and powerful cloud ever created—we’re talking cumulonimbus here. In a typical benchmark, a website hosted on Orpheus’ private cloud loads 8x faster* than a website hosted on BlueHost’s entry level hosting plan. So in a time where an hour of public interest can change your entire business, who do you want taking care of your site? *This is probably the fifth time we mention that Orpheus’ premium, no holds barred, ultra-absorbent, business-ready, platinum-level, three-dimensional, Grammy-nominated Managed Hosting platform is 8x times faster than economy level models. That is the kind of consistency you can expect from a company who has speeds clocked at being 8x that of leading brands.
It is not more expensive. Orpheus offers hosting fees as low as $12.50/month with a three-year package and we will migrate your first site for free. Do you hear that? That is the sound of all your hosting-related worries dropping off the face of the earth for the next three years. All for the price of three Big Macs a month and without the increased risk of a heart attack. Orpheus also manages your hosting control panel with all its management tasks included with your account. If you want other URLs and domains redirecting to your site, require the installation of an SSL certificate, or need to create a new FTP account, then you have it included in your subscription. Bam, it’s that easy.
You get hacking protection. Your website got hacked? No big deal. With daily backups stored on a separately secured cloud, in the off chance that someone jacks your site you won’t even have to worry about it. One fifteen-minute call and you’re back online. Then you can get back to what is really important, like reading about 123xyz and perfecting your best-yet paper airplane design.
Exceptional customer service. You are assigned a dedicated account representative you can contact 24/7 if you have an issue or need to make a change to your website hosting. Can you imagine how lonely it gets at 3am? Our folks are practically dying to speak with someone. Plus, all kinds of custom requests can be accommodated, including setting up various software on our servers for special needs, enabling newer versions of platforms like PHP and MySQL earlier, and more. There’s a bottom line when it comes to web hosting. You either pay to be a second-class citizen in your own website, or you move on to bigger and better options. The rationale is simple and can best be summarized by the age-old maxim, “You get what you pay for.” Don’t pay for garbage, get set up with Managed Hosting today.
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