Web hosting providers are in the business of making life easier for you by creating the ideal environment for your website to reside in. When things are ideal you will have nothing to worry about – your site is up and running at all times, visitors don’t experience lagging page downloads and all your media and apps load and perform as well as they should.

But when your web hosting provider goes “rogue” on you, you could find your website acting erratically and your visitors will find their experience to be a nightmare – if they can find your site at all.

Now, when your website represents your business online, and you face these problems, you can rest assured it will be disastrous for your year-end profit. A web hosting provider can cause irreparable damage to a business and so we will see the six ways choosing a bad one could be killing your business in the hopes you can avoid them:

It’s All Too Slow

The most common and annoying complaint is that of providers offering services that makes it maddeningly slow for sites to load.

Businesses usually make the mistake of going for the least-expensive plans or opt to deal with providers that aren’t up to the job at all and yet offer very attractive prices. What the businesses should know is that the providers offer low prices at the cost of the services they should, but aren’t, providing – fast connections and ample processing power being the most important among them.

Non-Existent Support

Some providers will reel in clients with promises of a Class “A” support system only to renege on their deal by failing to deliver when it is required.

A common issue is when tech support staff are hard to contact either because they are unavailable to begin with, or they simply have too many clients on their hands they just don’t have the time to handle them all. Another issue is the incapability of the tech support to resolve issues raised by the clients.

Either way, if a business site can’t have its issues resolved it could cost it dearly in the long run.

Lax Security Put in Place

A website is only as secure as the server it is hosted on. If a provider doesn’t have the standard security software and hardware protecting its servers it puts all its clients’ websites at risk.

Common problems that can arise include people accessing one another’s files on a shared server, resources being hogged by one website and resulting in poor performance of the others, malicious software being run from one site attacking the others or resulting in the server’s IP address being blacklisted or simply allowing outside hacks and attacks to destroy or steal data.

Business can research to see if any of the providers are blacklisted or are known for hosting notorious sites. Being associated with these sites alone will make visitors think twice about doing business that especially involves financial transactions.

No Scalability Plan In Place

Most businesses decide to go ahead with a hosting plan that fits their business now and tend to put off worrying about what happens when they grow until it actually happens.

That is a mistake that should never be made. No business runs blindly into the future; there are projections and plans that are put in place. Visions and goals are created and everything is made to realize and achieve them. Why shouldn’t a website’s hosting plan also have projections? After all, it is an integral part of the modern day business process, isn’t it?

In case there is a sudden surge in traffic, or a demand for more resources, businesses should talk with their providers to find out what happens when a quick upgrade is required. Smooth, seamless and no-downtime scalability is the sign of a good hosting provider and they are the ones to be sought out.

Otherwise, it is just waiting for the inevitable disaster to happen.

Rusty Ware Still In Use

Whether they are software or hardware, technology keeps upgrading them at a head-spinning rate. Business that have to rely on a provider that is still running old and outdated versions of either will kill the performance of the websites, stop them from realizing their full potential and even put them at risk of hacks and malicious software.

Businesses should always keep an eye on how fast their provider updates its wares. If it’s too slow, it’s time to move on.

SEO Rankings

The cumulative effects of slow loading times, too much downtime and having to share a server and IP address with spam or porn sites results in a business’ website being seen less favorably by search engines.

In fact, these are some of the major measuring points that Google uses to decide the ranking (or penalty) of a website.

A business website that finds itself losing its ranking because of these faults will almost never be able to achieve a good SEO ranking no matter how good of a campaign they have implemented from the front end.

And there you have it. Businesses should always make sure they have the best hosting for their websites – or at the very least opt for the one they can afford without being stingy on the budget.