1. Dealing With High Traffic Spikes
Every website likes getting a bit of attention here and there. Who doesn’t, right? But, the thing is: if your site gets too much of it, and especially after a period of no attention at all, it can result in your site crashing. Your site can’t cope with a sudden increase in interest.
For a competition business like you, this can happen more often. Web traffic isn’t as consistent. You might go from a quieter period to a busier one when you’re holding a competition or giving away a high-value prize. This influx will cause your site to fail.
This isn’t only annoying to you, but also to your players. They won’t be able to enter your competition, or if they will, it’ll take some time — and they might not even get in in the end.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Not if you have a solid web host.
Having a reliable web host helps with high traffic spikes in several ways, including:
- Automatic scaling: good web hosts — especially those using a cloud infrastructure — can automatically detect traffic spikes and instantly allocate additional resources like CPU and RAM to ensure the site remains responsive with no manual intervention needed
- Improved load balancing: good hosts can divide incoming web traffic across several servers rather than just relying on one, which will prevent any single server from getting overwhelmed and breaking
- High uptime guarantees: a reliable provider usually offers a high uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), which makes sure the site stays online, minimising downtime and missed revenue opportunities
2. Ensuring Trust and Security
The reliability and speed of a website builds trust between a business and the players.
Let’s go back to traffic spikes for a moment.
Say that your competition’s about to end in a few hours. This causes your web traffic to surge (people want to get those last minute entries in!), crashing your site in the process. Once the problem is fixed, your players come back to your site to a big ‘SOLD OUT’ text where ‘Enter now’ would’ve been. This creates huge disappointment, and erodes trust with your customers. It’s not great, and can be prevented by having a web host you can count on.
On another note, having an unreliable web host can also cause your website to lag and load suuuuper slowly. This can make users hesitant to enter their financial details, as they might not fully trust your website. Ouch.
3. Boosting Conversions and User Experience
Slow website loading times will also affect your conversions — and not in a good way. Even as little as a one-second delay in a page loading can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. And that’s not all. Slow loading times will also damage your credibility.
To build trust, and boost your conversions, you’ll have to boost those page loading times. And what better way to do it than by using a great web host, right?
No, but seriously. Having better hosting will help load your pages faster, especially on mobiles. This will improve your brand image, and thus also your conversions. Fast loading times also means your checkout will be frictionless, allowing your players to rapidly process their orders. That’s one heck of a way to get them to come back, and play again.
Want a Reliable Web Host? Get on Zap Host!
Zap Host is built specifically for competition websites like yours. When we set the host up for you, we consider how many orders you’re processing and how many tickets are up for grabs in each competition. It’s a high-performance hosting service, optimised for speed, uptime, and the other demands of online competition businesses.
Anything a competition business like you needs. It’s a web host you can trust.
Interested? Fantastic! Contact us today, and let’s make your competition website the best it’s ever been.
