Tips for Effective Website Hosting and Maintenance for Small Business Clients

by | Apr 21, 2023

If you sell website services, like web design and domain registration, then website hosting and maintenance is a perfect addition to your portfolio of solutions. It lets you turn one-time web design clients into sticky, long-term site maintenance clients, improving client retention and lifetime value.

However, if you’re going to get into the web hosting and maintenance services game, it’s important that you do it right: hosting has a major impact on site performance, which in turn impacts conversion rates. The tips covered in this article will help you offer your clients world-class website hosting and maintenance, so you can deliver meaningful value and establish yourself as the best site maintenance provider in your niche.

Best Practices for Website Hosting

Following these website hosting best practices will ensure that your small business client websites operate smoothly, and safely, supporting their business as they grow. In the event that something does go wrong with a client site, these will also enable you to respond quickly and effectively, before their revenues or reputation are impacted.

Regular backups and disaster recovery planning

Always set up automatic daily backups for your client websites. While you may still take manual backups on some occasions, backing up all your websites daily ensure you’ll always have a copy of the latest data in the event of a disaster or security breach.

Backups are a key part of a robust disaster recovery plan, but they’re not sufficient on their own. A disaster recovery plan is an internal standard operating procedure (SOP) that outlines exactly how a business should respond in the event of a disaster, such as a serious cyberattack or a fire.

The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to minimize the impact of a disaster on business operations and ensure that critical data and applications can be restored quickly. A robust plan might include the following:

  • Identification of risks for the business
  • Identification of important systems, data, and recovery goals
  • Backup and recovery process outline
  • Responsibility and communication plan to identify key roles in the event of a disaster
  • Training plan for existing and new employees
  • Vendor contact information for key vendors, like hosting providers

Security measures and SSL certificates

Website security measures can protect sensitive data in the event of a cyber attack. When choosing a hosting provider, ensure that they offer robust security measures like firewalls, SSL certificates, and malware protection. Having an SSL certificate on all your client websites ensures that all data transmitted between the website and its visitors is encrypted and secure.

Scalability and flexibility for growth

A hosting solution that offers flexibility and scalability will enable your SMB clients to grow without running into website performance issues. Website Pro includes hosting from the Google Cloud Platform, ensuring seamless scalability.

Speed and performance optimization

Speed and performance are important both from a customer UX perspective and from an SEO perspective. Loading times are a direct Google ranking factor, so ensuring you choose a website hosting and maintenance solution that delivers fast, well-performing sites will help them be more discoverable in Google.

Website Maintenance Tips

Staying on top of routine website hosting and maintenance tasks can go a long way in preventing issues and vulnerabilities from popping up. Build these into your site maintenance services.

Regular updates and upgrades

Failing to update plugins, themes, and WordPress versions can lead to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors. Staying on top of these updates is crucial if you want to protect your client websites from attacks.

While this can be done manually when you only have a few clients, it can become time-consuming as your client list grows.

Testing and debugging

Regularly testing client websites is a good way to identify bugs that require attention, preventing them from impacting the user experience for too long. Testing websites across different browsers and devices is a good practice since it’s possible for websites to have responsiveness issues that negatively impact their mobile-friendliness.

Monitoring and analyzing website traffic

Tools like Google Analytics, which is built into Website Pro, can help you identify popular pages and monitor website performance. Tracking this data can help you spot issues like slow page load times or broken links. A dramatic decline in website traffic can indicate a more serious problem, such as a website violating Google’s guidelines and being de-indexed in search results.

Troubleshooting common website issues

Even an expertly built website can run into issues occasionally. Common website issues include:

  • Broken links
  • Slow page load times
  • Server errors
  • 404 errors
  • Responsiveness issues
  • Ecommerce flow issues

Having a website maintenance team available to address these, such as Vendasta’s white-label experts, can help you troubleshoot any unexpected bugs and issues.

Common Website Hosting and Maintenance Mistakes to Avoid

The old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is truer than ever when it comes to website hosting and maintenance. Avoiding these common mistakes can save you—and your clients—a lot of difficulties.

Not backing up the website regularly

Slacking on backups is a bad idea. You never know when something might go wrong with a website, and having a recent backup makes it easy to get back up and running in no time. For example, something as simple as a plugin update can break the front end of a website. With a backup, you can quickly roll back to before the update was made and address the issue.

Ignoring website security risks

Cyberattacks are increasingly common, and small businesses make up over 40% of the victims (Fundera). Malware attacks and data breaches can expose client credit card information, passwords, and other private information. Website and hosting security risks should be taken seriously and prevented through the use of security measures like SSL certificates.

Neglecting website speed and performance

No matter how gorgeous your client’s website is, if it’s slow, it’s going to cause customers to bounce. Today’s internet users expect lightning-fast speeds and are easily distracted, so it’s important to regularly monitor website speed and performance and to improve them if they are not up to standard.

Failing to update website software and plugins

Updating software and plugins does have the potential to cause front-end issues if incompatibilities between plugins and themes arise, but this doesn’t mean updates should be ignored. It’s critical to keep all plugins, themes, and other software up-to-date and to address incompatibilities as they arise. Failing to do so can expose your client websites to unnecessary risk.

Choosing a Website Hosting Provider

The right provider can make offering website hosting and maintenance effortless. Consider these factors when choosing your provider:

  • Reliability and uptime
  • Security
  • Scalability
  • Technical support
  • Value
  • User interface and tools to manage multiple websites
  • Reputation

Types of Hosting Options Available

When shopping around for a hosting provider, you’ll find that there’s a wide variety of options to choose from. Here is what you’re like to encounter.

Shared hosting

With shared hosting, multiple websites share resources on a single server. Shared hosting is generally affordable and easy to set up, but it can have limited resources and scalability.

VPS hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a step up from shared hosting. With VPS hosting, a server is divided into multiple virtual servers, each with its own resources and operating system. Websites get a portion of a server to themselves. VPS hosting provides more control and flexibility than shared hosting and can be more scalable.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting provides a dedicated server for a single website or business. This option is expensive but offers more security, reliability, and scalability than shared or VPS hosting.

Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting is a flexible and easily scalable hosting option that allows businesses to use a network of servers—the infrastructure of their cloud hosting provider—to host their website. It’s highly secure, reliable, and scalable while being far more affordable than dedicated hosting. For small businesses, this is the optimal hosting solution.

Managed hosting

Any of the above options can be delivered as managed hosting, even with shared. You, as the hosting provider, manage all aspects of website hosting and maintenance for your clients using the hosting provider of your choice.

The Best Solution for Website Hosting

Vendasta WordPress Hosting offers a fully managed, white-label solution that helps agencies deliver fast, secure, and scalable websites at competitive prices. Whether you want to offer self-managed reseller hosting or fully managed hosting, Vendasta WordPress Hosting equips you with the infrastructure, automation, and support needed to grow your business while keeping client sites performing at their best.

FAQs

1. Why should I add website hosting and maintenance to my agency’s services?

Vendasta WordPress Hosting turns one-time web design projects into recurring revenue streams by letting you resell fully managed hosting. It helps improve client retention, increase lifetime value, and position your agency as the trusted provider for long-term digital success.

2. How does hosting impact website performance?

Website performance is directly tied to hosting. With Vendasta WordPress Hosting, every site is powered by Google Cloud Platform for lightning-fast load times, unbeatable uptime, and enterprise-grade security—ensuring clients see better conversions and SEO results.

3. What’s the difference between shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting?

Shared and VPS hosting can be limiting, while dedicated hosting is expensive. Vendasta WordPress Hosting leverages Google Cloud’s modern infrastructure, offering the flexibility, scalability, and affordability of cloud hosting—making it the optimal solution for SMB websites.

4. What role do backups play in website hosting?

Backups ensure your clients’ sites can be restored quickly if anything goes wrong. Vendasta WordPress Hosting includes automated daily backups and staging environments, giving you and your clients peace of mind with minimal downtime.

5. How do SSL certificates improve website security?

SSL certificates encrypt data and build customer trust. Vendasta WordPress Hosting includes free SSL for every site, protecting sensitive client and customer data while boosting Google rankings.

6. What routine maintenance tasks should agencies provide?

With Vendasta WordPress Hosting, agencies can manage updates, plugins, and WordPress versions from a centralized dashboard. This eliminates the hassle of logging in and out of accounts, while ensuring every client site stays secure and up to date.

7. What common mistakes should I avoid in website hosting and maintenance?

The biggest mistakes are neglecting backups, skipping updates, and ignoring site speed. Vendasta WordPress Hosting helps you avoid these pitfalls with automated backups, one-click updates, and Google Cloud’s high-speed infrastructure.

8. How does hosting affect SEO?

Fast, secure hosting is critical for search rankings. Vendasta WordPress Hosting ensures your clients’ websites are SEO-ready with optimized load times, mobile responsiveness, uptime monitoring, and Google Cloud-powered reliability.

9. How can agencies scale their hosting services as they grow?

Vendasta WordPress Hosting includes multisite management, allowing agencies to run up to five subsites from a single install. Combined with CRM integration and reporting, it’s built for scalability so you can grow your client base without adding technical complexity.

10. What should I look for in a website hosting provider?

You need reliability, security, scalability, and tools built for agencies. Vendasta WordPress Hosting delivers all of this in a fully white-labeled package, giving you the ability to resell world-class hosting under your own brand while managing everything from one dashboard.

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