Online Brand Presence Could Benefit From Overseas Local Web Hosting

Following on from our feature on Social Media Hacking, we have more news to help create successful online marketing campaigns, advertising brand reach while keeping in mind the various factors that can slow down your SEO success via your business’ conversion rates.

For increased protection against cyber crime, it is a worthwhile investment to looking to managed, 24/7 local hosting. The next level in hosting and site management is to opt for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that can, in real terms, improve the safety and peace of mind of an online SMB. Incapsula’s security team suggests a web application firewall (WAF). Any business with a web presence and data protection should be making use of this third-party security provision.

The application successfully filters malicious traffic, reducing cyber crime and data compromisation.

Local Hosting

Local businesses thinking of becoming an online brand actually prefer, if possible, to have a domain that reflects the locality of the business – a domain that identifies the brand’s country of origin – ‘.uk’ or ‘.nz’ for example. For a brand identity where a the image of global trade and dominance is part of a brand identity, the long established ‘.com’ domain is most certainly more appropriate and still used by much of the US and the West. Although much can still be said for being able to obtain a ‘dot com’ address, the domain can be intuitive in your brand’s identity and customer appeal. If the web host of the website is local to the site user, the site is much more likely to operate more quickly yet the reliability of local web hosting countries are still dependent on up to date infrastructure and downloadable internet speed. This still varies from country to country in a big way, but in certain areas such as Australasia, and in particular, New Zealand, much investment and technological emphasis has meant a huge improvement in local hosting capabilities for exponential projections for growth in the online hosting, domain, cloud and VPS providers and even the easy to use website building market. This can mean all the difference to a potential sale with SEO rankings now measured in part on a site’s page loading speed. The quicker a site loads, the more friendly the user experience is, resulting in the higher overall SEO rank in Google.

local-hosting

Why Local Hosting Can Help

With a customer list of 75,000, a quarter of a million domains sold – and counting – and an established list of mergers of companies established since 1997, New Zealand’s highest performing local web hosting and domain provider, Umbrellar, is the full package. Offering everything the international servers do at a competitive price, users can now start their online presence with local hosting with complete peace of mind. With a guaranteed 99.9% uptime rate, the Umbrellar company is going from strength to strength, recently featuring in Yahoo Finance who announced its recent combining of forces.

Speed Of Connection Massively Influences User Conversion Rate

The speed of a site load affects usability, and the overall experience for a site visitor. Certainly with retail, sites are evidently too slow if they take more than three seconds to load. The conversion rate of consumers is highly related to the site speed, with half a second of loading time making a huge difference. A domain page that takes one second to load will result in 7% reduction, while three seconds will see 40% of users abandoning the page entirely.

Local Hosting Can Positively Affect SEO Brand Visibility

The delivery of quick load page is essential to users, and hosts used on the other side of the world will need to ensure a content delivery network for local control. This exciting development of more widespread local hosting and domains can start to offer competition in a traditionally saturated ‘.com’ market. The benefits of NZ being English-speaking also helps its business possibilities as a legitimate alternative to ‘.com’. It can mean that consumers and business owners have more choice to suit their growing and specific needs to their country and user demographic, rather than a one size fits all package for budget friendly site management. Local hosting through newly improved locations in Australasia can help boost the online presence of ‘.nz’ domains, global SEO and Lead Generation can help this get further off the ground, Free Parking offer ‘.nz’ domain purchases from as little as $25. E-commerce and trading for local business can rate more highly with Google’s tougher algorithms and rules, while SEO ranking due to the faster loading of pages should enable local companies to rank as highly as international sites. Higher conversion rates are directly and positively associated with a faster page load.