As the person responsible for marketing your brand, or overseeing a family of brands, you are responsible for a lot and the website is just one aspect. But it's an important aspect - arguably one of the most important given that it's representing your business 24/7. No time off for high days, holidays or good behaviour!
In our experience, marketing teams often have very clear expectations when it comes to their website in terms of how it looks, what it offers to visitors and the overall user experience. But often marketing teams are less interested in hidden elements like hosting, which tends to be thought of as an IT issue.
However, choosing the web infrastructure that supports your website is of paramount importance. And given that your choice of website host underpins the ability of your business to exist online, it's fair to say you need to make a well-informed decision about your hosting service.
Finding the right choice of platform may feel like a minefield, there's no shortage of jargon, many misleading deals and frequently confusing price structures. This is why you need a solution that gives you everything you need, without breaking the bank (or your brain!)
In this article, we consider 3 reasons why your choice of web hosting service is a key marketing decision - not an IT problem to solve.
Scaling your business with ease and confidence
When you outgrow shared hosting services, you need to find a new service that is affordable now and will support you as your business grows, whether through organic growth & expansion or via mergers & acquisitions.
If you already have more than one brand within your digital portfolio, you may also be looking for a solution that gives you a clear overview of your digital assets and can be easily managed - ideally by a single team, or by a small number of teams within each subsidiary.
Security and resilience
As we mentioned above, your website(s) represents your business 24/7, 365 days a year. It's a vital part of your brand reputation so you want your audience to feel safe and secure using it. You also need to know it'll be available even if your staff aren't.
Similarly, if you need to test changes before they go live, you need confidence that your hosting service won't fail under the strain, or make it difficult to roll back to a previous version should changes not work as you expect.
Maximising your marketing budget
If you think of your website hosting service as simply an overhead you have to pay for the privilege of being seen online, I'd urge you to think again.
Marketing teams are under pressure to demonstrate ROI on every aspect of their budget spend and can often overlook the hidden risk and costs associated with hosting your website. This is covered a little more below when we look at the pros and cons of using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution but, essentially a great choice of website hosting service can free up more money to be spent on the initiatives that generate revenue for your business.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions
You will be familiar with providers like AWS, Azure, Orange and Google Cloud to name a few. And these providers are great at what they do. They're widely used by businesses of all sizes and offer a brilliant range of buildable services to their users.
There are, however, downsides to these services. Whilst they may be appealing to users thanks to their wide usage and often cheap (or even free!) pricing, that doesn't last forever. The structure of their offering is so versatile and vast, that they can tke care of everything for you as you grow, which means that what was initially a free, or low-cost service, quickly becomes more expensive as you add bolt-on after bolt-on.
What's more, because those bolt-ons mean that it's actually quite hard to outgrow these providers, you become more and more reliant on increasingly complex additions that become not just expensive but technically hard to unravel!
As a result, many businesses end up staying with them long after they should have left, draining money from your budgets that could be used more wisely elsewhere.
If we take AWS for example, you can quickly find yourself ploughing considerable time, resources and expertise into using AWS to host your site. This is because there are a lot of intricacies to using their bolt-on services and functionality that aren't easily changed by someone who isn't well versed in how AWS works.
Obviously, Pivale can help with that - but we feel there is a better solution out there that has all the benefits of AWS and the like, without the problems. In our next article, we'll be sharing more about our switching service that helps you make a seamless transition platform.sh.
Why we love platform.sh
Here's the best bit. There is a solution that we love, and it helps our clients rest easy knowing their web platform is working for them, 24/7. And it works on top of the big players like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Platform.sh is our preferred provider thanks to the service's simplicity, versatility and emphasis on security. Their pricing is clear and consistent, providing a great service at a cost that suits those conscious of budget as well as the extra demands and Service Level Agreements required by enterprise clients.
Importantly, platform.sh are also extraordinarily committed to reducing its carbon footprint and protecting our planet. You can read a lot more about that here.
Finally, if you did make the decision to switch away - it's often easy to do so.
Get expert help with your web hosting worries
As we've established, your web hosting requirements depend on where your business is currently at, and where you're going. However, we strongly recommend investigating platform.sh as the ideal solution to help you scale. Our clients are often surprised by how affordable it is to have an enterprise-grade solution.
