This is a guest post written by Lindsay Pietroluongo.
In 2020 and beyond, what kind of hosting will you need to provide for your clients’ websites?
Let’s say that it’s a regular weekday. On this day, though, your client has a post go viral on Reddit, or maybe their product is mentioned on an influencer’s Instagram Story. All of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of people are heading to their website. If their site can handle the influx of traffic, you look like a hero – it’s your agency that was able to support their success.
What if their site can’t handle the traffic, though? When a client calls to say their website is down, you understand the negative impact it has on their business. When your hosting doesn’t perform well, and your clients can’t rely on you to sustain their site, the reputation of your agency is at risk, too. Before long, your growth rate can slow or stall.
Legacy platforms don’t have the same memory, processing power, and storage resources that newer hosting technology has. Plus, the value of legacy hosting depreciates over time, which means your client websites are more likely to fail.
Websites have to run and function even as you and your clients sleep. When the websites you’ve created perform well and satisfy visitors, you and your clients will be able to get some rest. Infrastructure issues can be solved; they don’t need to keep you up at night.
What are the common problems agencies face when it comes to ineffective hosting? Let’s explore the top concerns:
1. Slow Page Load Times
According to Sean Work, former Director of Marketing as Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds, and 40% of users will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds. Furthermore, a delay of just one second can lower conversions by 7 percent. Essentially, if your web pages take too long to load, you’ll lose potential customers and revenue to a competitor.
2. Inability to Handle High Traffic
With most legacy hosting providers, you rely on one server even if there’s a heavy increase in traffic. The entire site can easily crash due to a single point of failure. To a client who has finally received the traffic, they’ve been hoping for, having their website crash is devastating – and it can ruin your professional relationship with them. Even if the site doesn’t completely crash, it can seriously slow down. Either way, it’s like having a line outside of your brick and mortar store and then having the doors lock themselves so nobody can get in.
3. Losing a Website Forever
To a website owner, the worst thing that could happen is permanently losing their website. Anything from a small security breach to a major attack can ruin a website that hasn’t been properly backed up. Automated, regular backups are necessary for a website to function, even when something goes haywire.
4. Security Breaches Put Clients at Risk
According to an investigative report by Verizon, in 2019, 28% of cybersecurity breaches involved malware, 33% involved social engineering, and 52% involved hacking. Moreover, RiskBased Security reported that in the first half of 2019, more than 4.1 billion records were exposed due to data breaches. Convesio has advanced features and options to keep websites secure, including site isolation, encrypted connections, and malware scanning.
You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and resources to build your agency and an impressive client portfolio. The more websites you can build for clients, the more revenue your agency receives.
However, as your business grows, you juggle additional tasks for clients, which means there are more opportunities for problems to arise. You feel like hosting issues shouldn’t be wreaking havoc on your business.
Convesio acts as your partner-in-tech. They proactively handle hosting tasks and prevent common problems so that you can focus on high-level responsibilities, like onboarding new clients and solving complex issues that require one-on-one attention. Plus, they have leading solutions for future-proofing your website against best-case scenarios, like viral traffic, and worst-case scenarios, like security breaches. The hosting you choose should support your clients’ websites and their needs – and, in turn, support your business and livelihood, too.
Meet Conor Cahill of Convesio
Conor grew up in a setting where everyone’s lives revolved around the family agency, Resident Capture. It was always a goal of Conor’s to bring the same values he grew up with to other companies, especially ones that reminded him of his father’s agency.
Resident Capture provides SEO, reputation management and web development services for the multi-family and property management industry, and Conor was immersed in the business from the start. “My parents never had any sort of separation between work and home,” Conor says. “Because of this, I grew up in an environment where digital marketing, business, and our agency were discussed every day in the house. Over the years, the information found its way into my head, and before long, I had a real passion for the stuff.”
When he was just a junior in high school, Conor took on digital marketing work while also helping out Resident Capture. Most of his focus was on PPC campaigns and WordPress development, and much of his education came from being around the business. “Growing up in an environment that was so focused on growing the agency to provide for our family was an invaluable experience,” Conor says. “I felt I learned much more by eavesdropping on conversations at home than I ever did in school. It also taught me the importance of being able to teach yourself things and execute.”
A few years later, Conor was working part-time as a digital marketer in San Francisco, learning and improving his software engineering skills.
Discovering Convesio
Conor and his father always kept their fingers on the pulse of the tech industry, ready to leverage a promising new technology if it presented itself. One day, Conor’s father sent him a link to an article. The topic? Convesio, the “next generation of WordPress hosting and management.”
They were excited about the tech being used and how advanced Convesio seemed. Coincidentally – or serendipitously – Conor’s father was visiting him in San Francisco at the time, which was also where Convesio’s founder, Tom, was based. They scheduled a casual meeting over coffee.
They hit it off. All three of them came from similar backgrounds – digital marketing and agencies in the multi-family, property management industry. Conor and Tom stayed in touch, and not long after their initial meeting, Tom offered Conor a role with the Convesio team.
Becoming Part of The Team
The team at Convesio is made up of Conor’s kind of people: those who managed worked for or worked with digital marketing agencies. They come to work every day with a dedication to their customers, particularly because they know exactly what their main concerns are and how to solve them. And for Conor, the best part is being able to help his dad on a regular basis – his father is a Convesio customer, relying on the service to run his own agency smoothly every single day.
Conor remembers the family vacations when his father spent most of his time holed up in the hotel room, trying to contact his hosting provider’s customer support line as clients panicked over their failing website.
“To me, it’s more than just a job,” Conor explains. “It’s a mission to help those like my father and our family go on vacations, spend more time together and relax without the worry of mass site outages or clients breathing down their necks about site speed.”
To Conor, ensuring that Convesio’s clients avoid that type of stress is his main purpose. And so far, he’s accomplished it, with nothing but high hopes for the future.
Convesio Has the WordPress Hosting Features You Need for Peace of Mind
The team at Convesio knows what worries customers and how to solve those common problems with their selection of benefits and features:
Handle traffic surges with ease
When the best possible scenario occurs and your website finally sees a huge surge of traffic, the last thing you want is for it to slow down or crash. Even a delay of one second more than visitors want to wait can create a decline in potential revenue.
With auto-scaling, there’s no downtime or website crashes. You don’t have to worry about going through a time-consuming procedure beforehand so your website can scale, either. And with the ability to detect high-traffic events before they occur, they don’t even get the chance to cause a problem on your site.
Convesio uses multiple load-balanced containers to duplicate instances of WordPress. That means that the WordPress site will always be available. Plus, if a container goes down, it will be automatically re-deployed.
Reliable Processing Power
Sticking with the same host you’ve been relying on for years means you’re not getting all of the memory, processing power, or storage you need to properly maintain your clients’ sites. The value of your legacy hosting has depreciated with time, and having a single point of failure makes it easy for an entire site to crash.
While it’s common for a hosting provider to let you scale up by buying a more powerful server when you need additional resources, Convesio scales out. Additional Docker containers are used as needed, splitting traffic between them with load balancing. The website will continue to perform well and have high availability because a single point of failure doesn’t exist.
Secure Backups
After all of the money and time your clients have invested in their websites, it would be devastating – professionally, financially and personally – if their sites disappeared forever. It would put your business in a jam, too, because your clients wouldn’t trust you any longer.
With redundant hosting, a dedicated server is hosted inside a data center. Redundancies keep the server running smoothly even in extreme situations, like during a power supply failure. Convesio also automatically backs up your websites on an interval you set, which can be anywhere from three hours to 15 days. There’s also the option to create on-demand backups when you need them in between your set intervals.
Pay for What you Need
Hosting services often charge you for a lot more than you end up using. Let’s say you want your server to handle 200,000 visitors during peak times. Why pay for that many visitors during non-peak times? Or, what about providers who can’t keep up with high traffic that seemingly comes out of nowhere, causing your website to slow down or crash and charging you for it anyway?
Not only does Convesio offer auto-scaling, but they also auto-scale you back when traffic dies down. In the end, you only pay for the resources you use. During traffic surges, you’ll pay a bit more because more containers will be deployed, and then when you’re done using them, you’ll go back to your regular billing.
No more Security Breaches
There’s not a business out there that isn’t vulnerable in some way. With so many data and security breaches being reported, clients are understandably nervous that their website will be compromised, too. The more security features and options a hosting provider has, the more the client will trust them to protect their website and all of the customer data they collect. Convesio has WordPress-specific firewalls, plus malware scanning and free SSL certificates.
The Next-Generation of Hosting is here
You don’t want your clients to worry about losing their sites or customers due to slow load times. You’d never want a client’s website to be hacked or for it to crash right when they get the traffic they’ve been waiting for. And most of all, you want your clients to focus on what’s most important to them and leave the rest to a provider they trust.
Next-generation WordPress hosting from Convesio means standing behind our promises and delivering consistent, fast, safe websites for customers at an affordable price. Most importantly, our team cares deeply about our clients, not to mention the world of WordPress hosting and management.
“This past year since joining the Convesio team has been a dream come true,” Conor says. “I get to work on a platform that puts its money where its mouth is by bringing speed and consistency, and I also get to work with a team that deeply cares about its customers in the WordPress hosting and management space.”
To learn more about auto-scaling and self-healing WordPress hosting, book a demo with Convesio today.
