Business Advice 101: Why You Should Be Hosting Your Own Website

Business Advice 101: Why You Should Be Hosting Your Own Website

With the average small business now sinking around $75,000 a year into digital marketing alone, it’s clear you need control over your digital life. Your brand’s digital life is deeply dependent on how you spend your money and how you set things up.

If you’re not hosting your own website, you’re going to struggle to control your digital life.

Here are four reasons you should be hosting your own site.

1. No Strange Downtime

One of the most frustrating things about not hosting your own site is having to wait for a response from your web guru. You can end up in the precarious position where you have a problem and you’re waiting for a phone call or email from someone in another time zone. While you’re waiting, customers could be trying to log in and end up somewhere else.

No matter what industry you’re in, you have to have a strong and reliable web presence in today’s market. Every company around you is going to have a website that doesn’t ever go down and where customers can get everything they need.

When you’re looking at whether or not to host your own site, you need to know exactly how impatient your audience is. Visitors give you about five seconds to load your page on their device, even if they have a poor connection. That means you have to be fast and always ready to serve customers.

When you have mysterious downtime, that could be dollars running down the drain. Don’t risk that and instead host your own website. Look at the kinds of tools companies like Hosty have to offer when it comes to putting you behind the wheel.

2. Own Your Assets

If you want to make sure that you’re always getting the most out of your site and your content, you need to own your assets. You need to be able to manage them as needed, add, subtract, and edit them whenever its necessary. Owning your assets is easy if you how your own website.

When you host your own website, you can change whatever you need to at a moment’s notice. Your assets need to be high quality, regularly updated, and optimized for quick download on mobile wireless devices.

If you have a lot of good content that hasn’t changed in ten years, you might want to start replacing the files. Devices are capable of displaying higher resolution videos and photos faster and more easily than ever before.

If you’re not giving your customers the best possible version of your content, they can finally handle it.

When you host your own site, you never have to worry about losing tour assets. Everything belongs to you and lives or dies on your terms. When you’re handling hosting, you can handle all the assets on your site.

3. Maintenance When You Need It

In the last ten years, the rise of mobile browsing has changed the way we do business online. With mobile devices now accounting for more browsing traffic than desktops and laptops, there are changes constantly coming down the pike. If you’re not ready for the next big change, you’re going to get left in the dust.

When you host your own site, you have access to everything when you need to. Maintenance needs happen all the time, with major software companies coming out with reports talking about problems with their services and tools. If you find that you need to quickly update a tool you use for productivity at your company, you can do it at a moment’s notice.

When you have to wait for a web designer who hosts your site for you, you could be a sitting duck, just waiting for hackers to knock on your door. Instead of playing the waiting game, especially when it comes to the security of your site and your data, why not set up your own hosting.

Cybersecurity could cost you more than you realize if you don’t keep watch over all of your digital assets.

4. Scale When You Need To

One of the perpetually difficult things for any company to manage is their scale. Companies ebb and flow over time, growing and shrinking as the market changes.

While some companies stay in business for decades, they often change their size drastically in every direction over that life span.

If you want your business to last, you need to be able to grow or shrink at the drop of a hat. If your products start resonating with consumers at an unexpected time, you need to scale up and get more space and bandwidth for your new users. If your products hit a slump, you need to be able to trim the fat as needed.

One of the things that you might need to change about your companies is how big your website is and how many resources you use. People prefer more minimalist websites right now, but as products and wireless devices advance, they might be able to handle more complexity.

You need to be ready when the time comes to make the changes required for you to grow and to change. While growing smaller can often mean that you’re more efficient, sometimes it’s a survival tactic. If you want to survive, you need control over everything, even your web hosting.

Hosting Your Own Website Makes Practical Sense

One of the biggest reasons for hosting your own website is just the logistical aspect of things. You need to have control when you need to make major changes and putting it into someone else’s hands isn’t always practical.

If you want to stay ahead of digital marketing trends this year, check out our guide for more info.