Google ads and Facebook ads may provide you with targeted visits to your site in a very short time. However, before you increase your budget for ads, you need to ask another question, “Is your hosting ready for this traffic?”
The difference with paid advertising is that there will be sudden influxes of visitors to a website unlike in the case of organic traffic. There is a possibility that a landing page which does well when visited by a handful of people will have difficulty coping with a huge number of visitors in a short period of time.
This is the reason why hosting needs to be considered when developing your marketing campaign. When Google is analyzing advertisement destinations, it takes into account factors such as the landing page experience, page speed, mobile usability, and user experience.
With this guide, you will find out how to select a good hosting to support websites driven by Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other paid campaigns.
Table of Contents
The Importance of Hosting for Pay Per Click
When someone clicks on an ad, you’ve paid to get him or her to visit your website.
The process is simple:
| Ad → Click → Landing Page → Website Visit → Conversion |
Your hosting will be involved in this process to a certain degree. It will affect how your server will react when receiving requests for different items.
Assume that your website usually gets 50 visits an hour. You have a successful campaign and, as a result, several hundred visitors come at once.
In case your hosting is short on CPU power, memory space, PHP processes, databases, or any other resources, the overload may lead to slower reactions and even errors. This issue does not mean that you have “too many visitors” for your website, but that the hosting environment cannot handle all the requests in time.
What to Look Out For in Hosting of Google & Facebook Ads
1. Select Hosting Depending on Traffic Peaks
Do not select a hosting package only depending on the average number of your monthly visitors. Advertising campaigns may generate peaks of traffic and should be taken into account when considering whether your hosting is able to handle your campaign.
Thus, for instance, 30,000 visits throughout a month and 10,000 visits in the period of an advertising campaign may put quite a different load on the server.
Before buying hosting, consider:
- Whether the website performs database-intensive tasks
- Expected visitors from your ads
- How many campaigns will run simultaneously
- Whether traffic could increase unexpectedly
- Whether visitors will arrive at the same landing page
- How long each campaign will run
Your hosting should have enough capacity for your expected peak workload, not merely your average traffic.
2. Make Mobile Performance a Priority
It’s wrong to assume that users who visit your advertising campaigns do it via desktops. Users engage with advertising on their smartphones, which means you have to design a site that performs well on such devices.
According to Google, you should pay attention to mobile speed, navigation, and taking actions. Your web hosting needs to have sufficient resources to handle mobile traffic properly; however, the website itself needs to be optimized for mobile too.
It’s better to test your landing page on mobile devices rather than checking whether the website loads on a smartphone.
3. Check out Your CPU, RAM, and other Server Resources
There is more to measuring than storage and bandwidth.
In order for your advertising campaign to work well, you must consider all the resources your account has access to, such as:
- RAM or Physical Memory
- Entry processes
- PHP workers
- CPU
- Input/Output
- Storage
- Database resources
The resources decide how efficient your server will be in processing requests.
For instance, when many users at once fill out forms or access dynamic WordPress pages, the server will have to process many PHP and database queries.
In HarmonWeb’s guide to shared hosting resources, you will come across how CPU usage, memory usage, entry processes, and I/O limitations could influence website performance.
4. Opt for Quick Landing Pages
The landing page is where the money you’ve spent on advertisement is converted into a visitor.
If the landing page takes too much time to be usable, the user might abandon the site before you have shown them what you offer. According to Google’s guidelines for ads, Google encourages advertisers to assess their landing pages’ efficiency and increase their mobile load time.
Hosting will play its role in achieving this, but it is not everything.
To have a fast website, you also need:
- PHP optimization
- Image optimization
- Efficient coding
- Database optimization
- Caching
- Lightweight themes and plugins
- CDN when necessary
For more info on that, refer to our article about optimizing web hosting for better loading time.
5. Do Not Mix Up Bandwidth and Server Capacity
When a hosting service advertises that it offers “unlimited bandwidth,” it does not automatically imply that it has the capability to manage unlimited number of users at one time.
Bandwidth refers to the transfer of data. As regards the server capacity, it means that the server has sufficient capacity to process the requests. It could be possible for a website to have high bandwidth, yet to be slow since it does not have enough RAM, PHP, CPU workers, database, or anything else.
The importance of this point cannot be underestimated by websites that have pay-per-click campaigns.
6. Use Trusted Hosting With High Uptime
An advertised campaign on pay-per-click will keep working even if your website has downtime. This is an especially irritating problem because you are paying for the traffic that will have no possibility of reaching your site.
Prior to selecting a provider, one needs to pay attention to the uptime policy, the provider’s infrastructure, monitoring process, maintenance policies, and customer support.
Don’t concentrate solely on the percentage provided by the provider on their sales page. It is important to know what actions the provider takes in case of infrastructure failure. It is necessary to note that uptime guarantee doesn’t mean your site application will never go down.
An error in the plugin, database error, DNS problem or wrong configuration could also prevent access to the website.
7. Consider WordPress-Specific Hosting
If your advertising site operates with WordPress, that does not mean right away you should get an expensive VPS. A good shared hosting plan will be enough for a smaller promotion and a well-optimized website.
However, WordPress sites with high-paid traffic might require a hosting environment tuned for WordPress. HarmonWeb’s WordPress web hosting packages are created for the needs of WordPress users and are equipped with such features as more PHP workers, WordPress optimization, security, and WP-CLI.
What matters most is that the web hosting should be adjusted to your traffic and workload.
8. Look for Ease of Scalability
Your advertising campaign might begin small but prove successful.
At such times, you must be able to enhance your hosting facilities without recreating the whole site. It is especially helpful in the following areas:
- E-commerce marketing campaigns
- Product launches
- Event registrations
- Large Facebook/Instagram campaigns
- Seasonal promotions
Currently, HarmonWeb offers shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting, making it possible for websites to migrate into more resource-intensive hosting as they grow.
9. Website Security and SSL Certificates
Marketing campaigns can generate traffic on your website, and therefore website security becomes very crucial.
When selecting a web hosting company, make sure that your hosting package includes things like:
- Malware detection
- SSL certificate
- Firewall
- Security monitoring
- Backups
- DDoS protection
SSL becomes especially crucial if you collect names, email addresses, phone numbers, payment details, or any other kind of customer information on your landing page.
Another scenario where SSL comes into play is when someone visits your site for the first time using a banner ad.
10. Look at the Location of the Hosting Server
The location of the hosting server could influence latency.
For instance, if most of the customers targeted by your advertisements live in Nigeria, then the location of your hosting facility will be worth looking at. Hosting a server that is near the location of the customers is an ideal way of reducing request distances.
The factors of server resources, the quality of the network connection, caching, web site optimization, and CDN configuration should also be taken into account.
For more information about that, take a look at our article regarding server location and its impact on web site performance.
11. Ensure That You Have Access to Backups
Picture yourself running a critical ad campaign only to realize that a plug-in upgrade has made your landing page non-functional.
In such a case, without a backup copy, restoration of the website might be prolonged. Before you settle on the host you’ll use, consider the following:
- What they have
- The frequency of backups
- How they’re restored
- The duration they stay stored
- Whether there will be any fees for their restoration
While backups won’t speed up your site, they will minimize the possible downtime due to unforeseen circumstances. Read our article about to backup your website successfully.
12. Verify PHP and Database Efficiency
A dynamic web site doesn’t just serve up a static file to each user. PHP code and database data may need to be processed by WordPress and other CMS’s in order to generate a page. This can create an added load for the server when multiple users visit at once.
Prior to purchasing hosting services, be sure that it can handle recent PHP versions and that there is adequate PHP and database resource support.
This becomes extremely important when one’s website is utilizing plugins such as WooCommerce, booking engines, memberships, complicated forms, etc.
VPS or Shared Hosting for Paid Advertising?
This is simply because having Google and Facebook ads on your website does not necessarily mean that you need to have VPS or shared hosting. A business operating a small landing page with little traffic might work just fine on an appropriate shared hosting service.
However, a website with big traffic bursts will sooner or later need more capabilities. Take into account a high-end hosting package or VPS if you frequently run into any of the following issues:
- PHP worker limit exceeded
- Slow queries
- Resource errors
- CPU limits
- Memory limits
- Timeouts
- Decreasing landing page effectiveness amid heavy traffic
The idea here is not to spend on the costliest hosting that is out there but rather to be able to manage your load.
Hosting Tips to Remember Before Running Ad Campaigns on Google and Facebook
Before starting a paid advertising campaign, make sure you ask these important questions:
- Can the hosting cope with my maximum amount of visitors?
- Do I have enough PHP workers under the plan?
- Is the website quick on mobile?
- Is the difference between bandwidth and server resources well-defined?
- Is my server in the right place for my users?
- Can I deploy my analytics and tracking software?
- Does the hosting service have caching capabilities or CDNs?
- Is the landing page conversion process tested?
- Is the uptime satisfactory?
- Do I have backups?
- Is there SSL security?
- Does the hosting accommodate my PHP and databases needs?
If you do not have the answers to these questions, then check out the hosting package before investing more money into advertising.
Conclusion
It is not just about storage and bandwidth when selecting hosting for your website that is doing business via Google or Facebook ads. Hosting services have to be able to cope with traffic surges, serve landing pages fast, be reliable and provide you with adequate resources to support the scaling of your campaign.
Find a hosting service depending on the peak traffic and workload of your website, and add caching, mobile optimization, security, and performance monitoring to that. This makes sure that the traffic you are paying for will have a site to visit.
Avoid Wasting Your Advertising Money Through Hosting
With every single click costing you money, having a poor or unavailable site can make all the traffic from your advertising efforts go to waste. Proper hosting will provide your landing pages with all they require once you start getting traffic from your campaigns.
HarmonWeb provides shared, WordPress, and VPS hosting plans depending on your website’s needs. Select the hosting plan that meets the traffic needs of your site, and then upgrade as your marketing campaigns expand. Give your paying traffic a good landing place and make conversions easy for your visitors.
