Whether you are a small business, an SME or a large group, websites and mobile applications are great communication tools.
Websites
are considered the most important channel for a quality customer
experience (far ahead of a store experience, or a call center).
There are many types of websites:
- E-commerce sites that sell products or services
- Sites for content, information, portals, ezines …
- Community sites, social networks …
- Intranets that are dedicated to users belonging to the same structure or organization and are therefore not open to the public
- Extranets
that allow users belonging to the same structure or organization to
access a website, but whose access can also be extended to certain
external audiences (partners, customers …
More
recently, mobile application development has also helped improve
customer service and business visibility. The term “Mobile First” is
gradually becoming a standard. Now that you have created your site, you
are wondering about hosting.
Hosting websites and mobiles
requires specific skills and availability that are generally not present
in companies. As proof, large groups also use web hosts for their
websites and mobile applications.
We must also emphasize the
financial aspect. Hosting your site requires, of course, specific
skills, but also and above all a high-performance infrastructure
allowing near 100% availability of your mobile sites and applications.
The elements to take into account for the hosting of your websites:
1. The simplicity of use
Before
creating a website, you must have reserved the domain name of your
company or the product you want to put forward (example:
cabinet-avocat-dupond.com). The choice of the domain name is crucial
because it corresponds to the address that allows your customers,
prospects or partners to access your site. In order for your domain name
to “point” to your website, you must set a number of fields (DNS …).
This is a simple manipulation for a web expert but much more complex for
a non-initiated.
Whether you are a novice or a web expert, it is
essential to have tools to create and manage your websites. The CMS
(Content Management System) allows you to create, modify your websites
without having specific knowledge of web development languages (HTML
…). You access the content of your sites from a simplified interface.
CMS, the most known, are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop
(specialized in the management of e-commerce sites).
2. The security of your websites
It is increasingly important to secure your websites for several reasons:
Your site may be the target of an attack and thus be slowed or even inaccessible
The
data exchanged on your site (information to identify oneself, payment
information …) must also be protected in order to secure the data
entered by your customers and partners.
It is therefore essential to put tools in place to help secure your sites.
3. Backup and restore your sites
Backup
and restore sites is often a neglected point in the choice of web
hosting. It seems essential to save the different versions of your
sites. In case of deletion by mistake, you have the option to restore
your site to the correct version.
4. Agility and performance
Do
you manage a website with high traffic and/or greedy in terms of
databases? Your website is conditioned to a seasonal activity that
generates sudden traffic spikes? This high traffic, a sign of the
popularity of your site, is not without constraints. It may reduce the
performance of the site and, in the worst case, make your site
unavailable. The result? A degraded user experience and a user
disappointed by his visit: slow loading of pages, lack of fluidity,
unavailability of the site …
It is therefore important to
select your host based on its ability to accompany you and provide you
with the best advice to evolve the hosting of your sites. The partnership with your host must be formalized by a hosting contract, keeping accounts of legal texts in force.