I wanted to share one of my clients’ experiences with you. It’s a story I share verbally regularly, and it’s saved our clients’ reputation, money, and a mountain of frustration over and over again.
Hopefully, this story will help you too. It highlights something every business owner should know: your hosting provider isn’t just a tech service – they can directly impact your revenue, positively or negatively.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Matthew asked us to redesign, develop and optimise his website for Google, but wanted to host his website elsewhere. You see, he’d found a cheaper web hosting provider… We explained the benefits of hosting a website with the same company that developed it, educating him on a topic he was unfamiliar with.
Unfortunately, he chose to host elsewhere. At this stage, we offered advice on what to look for in a hosting company, encouraging the essentials and offering recommendations on who to approach and avoid.
Nobody expected what happened next
Six months after successfully launching Matthews’ WordPress website, we received a frustrated call from him. After noticing a severe drop in enquiries, he ran a few tests on Google and realised he was nowhere to be found.
He was no longer on page one of Google for his five key phrases (like he was after launching the new website). Since he wasn’t actively working on his SEO, there were a few reasons he could have dropped off page one.
Digging a little deeper, we realised it wasn’t just page one he was missing from. There wasn’t a single reference to his website, company, or services online.
Google was completely ignoring him.
Why had Google stopped suggesting his website?
Matthews’ hosting company updated their platform in a way that was incompatible with his website. This is one of the key reasons we recommend hosting with your web design company. While the website continued to operate, the change sent conflicting information to Google, and as a result, they removed his website and stopped indexing it completely, meaning his website stopped appearing in all search results. Ouch.
It’s worth noting that the above high-level overview of the problem doesn’t even touch on the real issues:
- The hosting provider did not communicate the change.
- They did not check if the change was compatible.
- No testing was carried out after their implementation.
They operated completely independently of all of their clients, with no communication or regard for the impact on their clients’ websites. They probably had no idea that this had even happened. So they’ll probably do it again. But not to Matthew. His website is hosted with Phancybox now.
If it seems too good to be true…
Then it probably is. And website hosting is the perfect example of this. You can’t pay $20 per month for web hosting and expect good communication, customer service and smooth internal processes. If, however, you are getting those three things, then they’ll be cutting corners elsewhere – your website will go down regularly, display errors, load painfully slowly or will be open to malicious access. You really can’t afford cheap hosting. It seems too good to be true because it is.
If you want peace of mind knowing your website won’t disappear overnight, we handle hosting, migrations, WordPress software updates, and monitoring right here in Noosa – all risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. Contact Judy today to discuss your hosting concerns.