B2B Website Hosting: Can you host your website yourself?
During a discussion the other week a customer asked me if it was ok for them to host their new website themselves as they have an MIS department. This is a surprisingly common question I hear from customers so I want to spend some time giving you the information you need to make the right decision about your website hosting and the impact it has on your marketing in general.
Table of Contents
Can Your MIS Department Host Your Website?
If your company is called Google or Amazon, yes. Otherwise, it is not a good idea. Website hosting requires a specialized infrastructure that is built around providing web servers that are optimized for the highest processing and page load speeds to help your website load and operate smoothly for your customers. They also require extremely fast internet connections that are not available to individual companies.
Most professional web hosting companies (We use Google) operate large data centers with teams of experts who are monitoring and optimizing the systems for performance and security 24 hours a day. They carry out server updates and automated backups and they have a very high server availability as well. Server availability is the percentage of time each month that a server is online and serving your website within a certain time to users (Ideally this should be less than 3 seconds).
Your MIS department cannot compete with a professional data center, with all of its services and super fast connection speeds so you should not consider this as an option.
Your Website Hosting Needs to be International
If you are a manufacturer in Taiwan and your customers are in other countries, then hosting your website in Taiwan is a mistake that can cost you money. Using a hosting location that is closer to your major markets such as the USA or EU is a better option.
Google says that it does not care about server location, but it does care about speed. If you are in Taiwan with local website hosting, trying to compete in the USA market, that will be very difficult. Customers accessing a website that is hosted closer to them will usually experience better loading speeds and a smooth user experience. This is especially true if your website has rich content such as video or interactive features which may not work smoothly if your website hosting is too far away from your customers.
(Image map of the USA showing local websites serving pages to customers and then a page from Taiwan that is slow and not operating smoothly.)
How Can I Check The Speed of My Website in Other Locations?
There are two free tools that I use regularly to test the performance of websites. If your website is hosted in Taiwan but your customers are in other countries, I suggest that you use this free tool. Just visit the site and copy / paste your website address into the search box to have it test your website for you:
If your result looks something like this image below then your website hosting is probably OK:
However if you look at the websites of these very well known Taiwanese manufacturers, you can see that their actual loading times in other countries are very poor:
So if you have used this tool to test if your website loading speed is acceptable for your customers and found that it is not good enough, what can you do?
How Can I Make My Website Load Faster for Customers?
There are two basic things that you can easily make happen that will instantly improve your website performance, move your website hosting, and use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
1.Move Your Website Hosting
We use Google data centers because this allows us to host our customers’ websites anywhere in the world and also move them very rapidly if required. Using a global supplier such as Google or Amazon ensures that you have great infrastructure hosting your website and gives you the flexibility to host it anywhere you want.
Ask your website provider about options for hosting your website in other countries and also which service provider they use.
If you are not sure where your website is hosted now, you can use this hosting checker tool to find out. You will receive a result like this which will tell you the location of the server hosting your website. In this case the website is hosted in Taiwan, even though their customers are mainly in other countries. This is a mistake that is probably costing them customers:
2.Ask Your Website Hosting Company To Set Up A CDN
If you have customers using the same language but in many locations, which is very common for English language websites, then using a CDN as well as international website hosting is probably the best option for you.
A content delivery network is a group of servers that work together to deliver content to users more quickly and efficiently. They do this by caching webpages on servers that are closer to the users who are accessing the web pages.
CDNs are not complicated or expensive so don’t allow your service provider to overcharge you for this service. Only global CDN providers such as Cloudflare, who works with Google, can effectively provide a CDN service. It only takes a few minutes to set up a CDN and if your hosting company is charging you for the service, they should not charge you more than NTD500 per month for the service.
What Do We Do At GlobalSense Marketing for Website Hosting?
At Globalsense Marketing, we use Google servers for our international and local website hosting as they provide the best combination of performance and scalability. We use Cloudflare for CDN services. Scalability is important as when more and more websites come online or numbers of customers increase we need to be able to easily upgrade our servers or even change hosting locations all within the same technical ecosystem. Google and Amazon both provide this service very well indeed and we have found them to be very easy to work with.
Getting your website hosting right is key to your business being able to attract new customers. Website hosting is cheap so do not choose a service based on price, go with the well known brand that has international reach to make sure that your global customers have the very best experience when visiting your website.
Key Takeaways
- Do not try to host your website in your company or on your own physical server
- Test the speed and performance of your website yourself to see if you have an issue
- Use global hosting providers such as Google or Amazon for your website hosting
Further Reading
Don’t Work With The Same Website Design Company as Your Competitors