Customer satisfaction is an integral part of a successful business; however, while most businesses focus their efforts on external customers, there are also real benefits to be gained by improving the satisfaction of internal customers. Here we’ll look at why it’s important to establish an equilibrium that benefits both internal and external customers.
What’s the difference between internal and external customers?
Essentially, external customers are the consumers that buy your products and services. They are customers in the traditional sense of the word. Internal customers are the stakeholders in your business, employees and partners who, rather than buying things from you, still need you to deliver services to them in order for them to carry out their work effectively.
The importance of customer satisfaction for external customers
While customer satisfaction has always been important, that importance has grown significantly with the internet. Today’s online consumers frequently seek social proof about a company or product before they choose to give it their custom and will look at reviews, ratings, social media comments and more in order to come to a decision.
How good those ratings and reviews are, of course, is directly related to customer satisfaction. If products are of bad quality, delivery is late, customer service is shoddy, the website too slow, etc., customer satisfaction will be poor and this will be reflected in what people have to say. As a consequence, the business at the receiving end will find it harder to attract new customers or keep hold of existing ones. This is why customer satisfaction is the predominant focus of most businesses – without customers, a company has no future. – Read more
The web hosting world is super fascinating. It gives you all kinds of options to get your site out on the web.
Hundreds of companies are already competing for your business, each offering several types of web hosting plans. Understandably, things can get very confusing very fast.
Every site has a web host, but you already know that. But what some of you may not know is that not every website is hosted the same way.
It’s why you need to educate yourself about the different types of web hosting. This knowledge will ultimately help you figure out the best option for your website.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about web hosting and its types. By the end of it, VPS, dedicated, and reseller hosting won’t just be ‘geek’ terms for you.
Ready? Let’s begin.
Why the Different Types of Web Hosting Are So Important
Before diving into the web hosting types, let’s familiarize ourselves with web hosting.
Websites are hosted on powerful pieces of hardware called servers that store the websites, along with their data. Every component of a particular website is kept on a server that’s accessible through your web host. Think files, text, videos, images… you get the drift.
The servers are managed by different web hosting companies that provide the technology and server space for your website. It’s how visitors can reach your site and view your content.
The interesting thing here is that all servers are different. It’s why you have a variety of web hosting options.
While most guides cover the four main types of web hosting, we want you to get the full picture. That’s why we’ll be discussing all of the six different types of web hosting.
#1 Shared Web Hosting
Hailed as the perfect entry-level website hosting, shared hosting is when your website is stored on the same server as several other websites.
When you choose a shared hosting plan, all the domains share the same server resources, including RAM and CPU. Naturally, since all the resources are shared, this type of hosting is the cheapest, making them an excellent option for beginners or entry-level bloggers.
Think of shared hosting as living in a hostel. While you do get your personal space, you have to share resources like electricity, water, and the kitchen or living room with your roommates.
The only catch? Potential slow loading times and performance issues.
Continuing with our hostel example, you might get a little late for an interview if your roommate takes longer in the shower, right? Similarly, you can face performance issues with your website if another website on your server experiences a traffic spike. – Read more
If you’re a start-up attempting to launch your business, there will no doubt be a lot on you plate to prepare and consider. Even if you are already established and are in a position to further grow your business online, how do you go about deciding what type of hosting is going to be best suited?
No matter what type of company or organisation you run or work for, having an online presence is vital in this day and age, and for those who don’t have the IT expertise, it can be costly or tricky to know which option to choose.
At CWCS, we want to making hosting as seamless as possible for the businesses we work with. Take a look at our guide to what options are available…
For businesses who are just starting out and have simple requirements, shared hosting platforms tend to be the go-to-option as they are simple to get started with and very cost effective.
Shared hosting is ideal for brochure sites, blog sites, test sites, and for companies who are just looking for an entry-level web presence. With this type of hosting, you are sharing the resources of the server with other sites so there could potentially be 100’s of other sites sharing the same pool of resource and storage. That’s why shared hosting isn’t a viable option for e-commerce sites as a surge in traffic could affect the performance of your site.
Your website should demonstrate who you are and be easy to use, without draining much-needed resources with expensive and unnecessary charges. You’ll need to consider bandwidth, SSL certificates, subdomains and webspace in order to choose the right hosting plan.
Once you start to grow and gain more visitors, then it’s time to look at more advanced hosting options.
Virtual Private Servers are a great option for businesses who have outgrown shared hosting and want to have dedicated resources at an affordable cost. It’s essentially a step between shared hosting and having your own dedicated or cloud server. This removes the potential negative impacts of other businesses impacting your website.
With a VPS you have more control and flexibility, for example, to make installations. VPS hosting is available in Linux and Windows and hosting control panels such as Plesk and cPanel can be installed. This allows you to manage your website and emails, and allows certain server configurations to meet your needs.
When it comes to VPS, there are various plans available so you’ll need to consider how many CPU’s (compute power) you need, how many GB’s of RAM and SSD storage is required, as well as your data transfers per month.
A lot of businesses can be frustrated by the logistical nightmares of hosting their data, either struggling to create the best environment to keep it secure, not having the high speed internet connection to meet the demands, or the fact that the servers are not in an optimal environment to get the best performance of the servers. Why not remove the need for your office to fulfil data hosting, allowing you to focus on your business?
Colocation allows you to move your severs into the safe environment of a securely managed data centre whist still retaining complete control over your servers. You can benefit from the data centres round the clock support, security, HVAC, fire protection and also the expertise of the DC’s onsite employees.
Colocation means that you rent rack space but you still retain control and are responsible for software, storage and backups. For businesses who have the technical expertise and simply want to move their equipment to a more secure environment, this is a fantastic option. However, for a start-up, it’s not as practical as you will have a larger upfront cost and will be required to still manage the servers yourself.
Managed Dedicated Server hosting plans provide you complete control and unrivalled performance levels so you can focus your time and efforts on what you do best.
Linux server hosting plans tend to be the most popular choice as they are available in many flavours including the latest CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat Enterprise, and hosting control panels such as Plesk and cPanel. This lets you customise a server to your precise business needs.
Although a more expensive option, with a dedicated server you will have higher levels or resource, unlimited bandwidth, more cores and threads and also more RAM. Having a dedicated server also gives you root access allowing you complete control.
Businesses will often move over to a cloud hosting platform when they have been having hardware failures and frustrations which are impacting on their business.
Although the name can appear off-putting, public cloud hosting is actually one of the most secure and effective ways to host online. With no single-point-of-failure within the infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about downtime. Public cloud is secure, scalable and allows for high-performance. With managed public cloud hosting, you can rest assured your service would never be impacted by hardware failure again.
Not only do you get a fully redundant platform but you also benefit from enterprise-grade hardware, reliable network speeds, as well as having the flexibility to choose what operating system and control panel to use. – Read more
