It’s 4:55 pm and you’re about to peel yourself away from your desk and enjoy a relaxing weekend. Everything’s under control: deadlines are met, business is booming, clients are happy. And then the phone rings. OK, most clients are happy. Your caller is a customer whose site traffic has slowed to a crawl, and guess who they’re holding responsible? (Yes, it’s you.)
The harsh truth is that your clients don’t discriminate between the different reasons their site might perform poorly, nor do they differentiate between the parties who may be responsible. You are their point of contact; you are the one they paid for a site. You are their “one throat to choke,” so to speak. And because they’re going to look to you for answers — whether or not they should — you need someone to look to when you don’t have those answers: a provider who specializes in hosting for web developers.
A Competitive Advantage on a Crowded Field
All hosting providers are not created equal. Just because a company is prepared to sell a hosting package to your business, doesn’t mean they understand the intricacies of hosting for web developers.
I don’t have to tell you that you’re facing fierce competition. New web development and digital agencies spring up every day, and each of those new firms is a potential competitor. The right hosting partner can mean the difference between success and failure for your firm. How? Let’s examine some scenarios that are probably all-too-familiar to you.
1. The Crash
The nightmare scenario for clients and agencies alike: when hours, days, and weeks of hard work suddenly appear to go down the drain and a website won’t load. This might be caused by an unexpected surge of traffic that the site just wasn’t ready to handle, “noisy neighbors” hogging bandwidth on a shared server, or a malicious attack designed to shut the site down.
A provider who understands hosting for web developers can mitigate the risk of outages, and provide immediate support should the worst happen. This means the likelihood of a crash diminishes, and if it does occur, you can tell your clients a solution is being developed as you speak.
2. The Costs
The ever-changing nature of technology today makes it a full-time job to stay current. As a small agency, you need to stay abreast of the latest trends to keep clients happy, but you don’t necessarily have the resources for the constant training, updating, patching, and transitioning that staying current requires. You need to maximize performance and grow your business without eating up all your profits doing so.
Partnering with a hosting provider who understands the need to stay current can lift a substantial load from your shoulders. While some hosting companies simply provide you a place to park your sites, one who offers hosting for web developers will ensure that updates and patches are performed regularly and keep you in the loop about new solutions, compliance and security requirements, and threats to your clients’ sites.
3. The Committee
Often there is more than one party involved in the planning and development of a new site, and each works with their own set of priorities on how the site will be architected, designed, and launched. Misunderstandings and poor communication among teams on the project can doom it to failure early on.
A managed hosting provider specializing in hosting for web developers can save you valuable time (and frustration) at this stage by consulting with all parties and drawing up a plan that factors in the priorities of everyone involved, including server requirements, optimization, regulatory compliance issues, or disaster recovery.
Hosting for Web Developers from a Provider Who Can Help
Rather than trying to educate your clients on what your responsibilities are as a web developer and what you can’t control, partner with someone who can help solve your problems. The right hosting provider — one who specifically offers hosting for web developers — can help. Not only will they provide proactive support for hosting-specific issues like server and network troubles, but they can work side-by-side with you from planning and architecture to testing and launch to help identify and eliminate potential problems.
So How Do You Find Such a Superman?
At PointClick Technologies, we specialize in managed hosting for web developers and digital agencies. We work with agencies just like yours to develop, build, and launch successful sites every day. If you’d like to learn more about the advantages of working with a provider who understands your needs (or how to find one), get in touch with us now or download our free Playbook for Web Development Agencies.
