A lot of the time, making a seemingly small decision does not matter…until it does. For example, I decided one day that it didn’t matter all that much if I decided to save my conclusion on a big final paper I was working on in college until morning because I was tired and could not think anymore, and I also did not need to set an alarm because my roommate also had to wake up early. Our communication was off, apparently, because when she woke up to go to work, she did not remember to make sure I was awake as well. I woke up half an hour before I needed to turn in my paper and be in class. Because I had made a sloppy and hasty choice that I figured would be inconsequential, I had no backup when things went wrong. Like my quick decision, making a hasty decision regarding where to host your website can ultimately impact many things if and when something goes wrong.
Your decision on where you host your website directly impacts the security, speed, and performance of your site. When your website is hosted on a server that is overcrowded and loaded to its capacity with websites that are hogging bandwidth or disk space, the speed of your website can be dramatically slowed down due to no fault of your own. This can be a problem, as a slow website risks sending you down the search engine result pages rather than propelling you upward. Shared hosting on a crowded server can also negatively affect the security of your website. If another website on the server is hacked or its data is otherwise compromised, yours could easily be affected too. Features such as two-factor authentication, firewall, and backups can help protect your website. Speed and security factor into your website’s performance. If it is slow or there are security issues, your website is not performing at the level you should be aiming for.