Your business’ website needs all the help it can get when it comes to having it propagated across the internet. It should be pushed out towards the visitors you hope to reach and do business with. You shouldn’t forget that no matter what your business may be, there are thousands of competitors out there pushing and vying to reach the same exact customer base as you.

Therefore, apart from making sure that your website looks and works perfectly, and hoping people will simply stumble upon your website (or hear about it from a friend and want to check your site out) you should actively make sure you are pushing your website to them. This process is known as website marketing.

Now, although you (or whomever is responsible for the website’s administration) will try to use methods like social media sharing, offline marketing and online advertising, there will come a time when no matter what you do it will all be in vain simply because your web hosting provider is not adept at what they are supposed to do.

In other words, there are some things that will be out of your control when marketing your website just because you have an inefficient web hosting provider – and no matter what you do, all your efforts will end in failure.

To clarify this, let us see how your site’s marketing depends on your web hosting provider:

Availability

This is a pretty straight forward matter. No matter how much effort you put into your marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it will be for nothing if at the end of the day your visitors rush to your site and find that there is nothing there – no website; no nothing.

One of the most important criteria upon which a web hosting provider is rated on is its uptime. And you, as a client, are expected to do your research before your choose your hosting provider to see they have an uptime of at least 98% – and not just because they say so but by going further and digging through the reviews made by third-party, independent websites and regulatory bodies.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the uptime will not decrease once you have signed up with them. In that case, you should make a switch to a more reliable service provider as soon as possible. You should never lose clients simply because your website is down – it should be available 24/7.

Speed

People today are busy, hasty and impatient. Everyone – including you – is aware of the precious minutes in a day and wouldn’t want to waste any time unnecessarily. Your website too, shouldn’t be a waste of time. In an online world where we see web pages loading almost instantly, you wouldn’t want to keep your visitors tapping their fingers or biting their nails as they wait for your pages to load. As a matter of fact, they won’t – as soon as they see there is a page lag, they will most probably close your site and move on to the next choice (which is almost always going to be your competitor).

Once you have made sure the slow loading is not happening from your end (bulky images, graphics or other media loading along with your pages, for example) you need to check with your ISP provider (to see they aren’t dribbling bandwidth your way) and then move on to your web hosting provider.

First, use online tools (there are many free ones) to find out exactly how slow your site is loading. Once you are sure the lag is because of your hosting provider’s servers or network, you can confront them with the evidence and proceed from there.

Ranking

No matter how hard you may try you will not have a decent online presence if your site can’t be found. And the best way it can be found is if search engines believe you are worthy of a high ranking.

As you probably know, one of the key ways search engines like Google rank the pages on their search results pages is by the speed of the page-loads and the uptime of the servers they are on. Any site that is slow to load and is down for more than they like is automatically shoved down the ranking table and will probably never see the light of day.

Blacklists

The worst thing that could happen to your website, especially if it is your business site, is for it to get blacklisted. This can happen if it happens to share a server (as in the case of shared web hosting) with sites that send out spam or are known for notorious (read “illegal”) activities.

Once they are discovered, their IP addresses (which also happens to be the same as yours) are blocked. This means that through no fault of your own, visitors to your site will be warned that they are accessing an unsafe or unsecure site.

Of course, no one will want to proceed any further and no one will want to try and come visit your site again. Your reputation plummets, as does your business.

Therefore, as you can see from the points above, it is always critical that you have a good hosting provider taking care of your business if you want to succeed in marketing your website.