7 Things to Look for in Hosting for Your Private Practice Therapy Website
You have decided to launch your private practice therapy website but unsure how to select the right hosting? With so many hosting options available in the market, which will be the most ideal for you? Also there are so many features that are listed on every hosting provider’s websites. That’s really confusing.
Through this post, you will get to know what are the 7 things that you should look in a hosting company while selecting one for your private therapy website.
1) Uptime
As a private practice therapist, building the first impression always work. That’s also true for your online presence. If your site is down when someone visit your website, they’ll click away and increase the bounce rate of the therapy website.
Server Uptime means the period for which the server remains operational and accessible whereas server Downtime means the period when the server is non-operational and inaccessible. Server Uptime shows how reliable a particular server is. It is often expressed in percentage.
The first thing that you should look while selecting a hosting for your private practice counselling website is the Uptime of the server.
Look for hosting services that provide 99.9%+ uptime guarantees and a public status page. Many reliable hosting providers have a dedicated page where they show the uptime and downtime of their servers.
That’s a solid way to determine how reliable the server will be for your website.
2) Server Location & Data Residency
Second important thing to consider while selecting a web host for your therapist website is the server location. The more closer the server will be to your location the more fast the website will load. You can learn this concept from this example. Consider that your location is New York. In the first trip you are travelling to New York from Newark and in the second trip you are travelling to New York from Washington. Which do you think will cover fast by road? I guess your answer is same like mine, the first trip from Newark to New York.
The same concept applies with the hosting data center. The closer the data center to your location, the faster the loading speed. Hosting closer to your main audience reduces latency (that “delay” before a page starts loading). If you serve clients mostly in one country/region, pick a data center there.
Almost all the reliable and trusted hosting providers disclose their server locations on their websites. You can check which hosting provider has a server closer to your city/state/clinic.
If you serve internationally, use a nearby region plus a CDN to serve assets globally which we are going to cover in the next section.
Also because you are in a medical profession considering data residency and privacy is also crucial: some practices prefer/require data to stay in a specific region (e.g., EU/GDPR, Australia/APPs, Canada/PHIPA).
If you are in the US, then you need HIPAA support. There you’ll need a provider that offers a BAA and proper safeguards. You should contact the hosting provider first if you need these agreements.
3) Speed (Resources, Caching, CDN Support)
Just like closer location of the sever improves therapist website speed, there are some other factors which influence the speed of the website. These factors along with server location can make your website load pretty fast. Many therapists doesn’t believe in optimizing the website speed. That not only make their private counselling website slow, but also leads to low case load.
If you are going with WordPress, then first thing to look after the location is what kind of servers the said hosting is using. There are many types of web servers. Litespeed, Apache, and Nginx are the popular ones.
Each server has different different data processing power which makes them fast or slow. From those choose those hosting that are on Litespeed web servers. These servers are faster than other kind of servers like Apache and Nginx.
Also, choose hosting that includes server-side caching, optimized PHP/HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, and easy CDN integration for images, CSS, and JS.
4) Security Built In
Not all the population on the internet have good intentions. There are always some people who try to harm you. They may try to steal your data, inject malware in your website’s code, take down your website and disrupt your business. You should look for a web host that protects your from all these malpractices.
Go for web hosting that provides secure encrypted link between a web server and web browser. It is called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). What SSL will do is it will encrypt the data between the website and browser by building a secure internet connection. SSL is also recommended by Google and other search engines and is given preference in search results.
There is also a harmful thing called DDos attack. It is a malicious attack target towards a website to disrupt its normal traffic. This attack increase the server’s resource limit and makes the website unavailable to the internet users.
Also, if unfortunately you become a victim of such attacks, the web host should have the capability to restore your website. It will be possible when they keep backup with them.
While choosing web hosting for therapists look for services which provide free SSL, a managed web application firewall (WAF), automatic daily backups (with one-click restore), DDoS protection, and malware scanning/removal. Two-factor authentication for your control panel is a plus.
5) Ease of Use
I know you are in a medical profession where you have to deal with clients facing different kind of struggles. You are not a tech person and you shouldn’t need to be. You need a hosting which you can manage easily with any trouble.
Many hosting providers provide dedicated dashboards from where you can manage all of your website’s function. For WordPress users DirectAdmin and Cpanel are two popular web control panels provided by hosting companies. These web control panels make managing a WordPress website a breeze.
While choosing a hosting provider for your therapist website, check with admin panel they are providing. A clean dashboard, one-click WordPress, staging sites, and clear documentation make life easier.
6) Helpful Support
Managing a website can require some tech skills sometimes. What if some code breaks and you are unable to fix it or what if the website go down? You shouldn’t have to wrestle with tech. When something breaks, you want 24/7 live chat or phone, short queues, and staff who actually know WordPress.
This is something which many hosting providers not provide. They either have just the option to send support emails and no live chat option or some gives paid chat option. This is really frustrating.
From my own experience, I can say that whenever any such things happen and you have to deal with support, without a live chat or phone call option, the time delay sucks. Some even will say that they provide 24/7 chat option but in reality they will not respond to your messages.
Also, talking about the email support, many hosting providers take very long time to respond and solve the query. Sometimes more than 24 hours to even respond.
Which choosing a hosting provider always check how quick they respond to your messages. Try their chat with a pre-sales question, send them an email and check how fast and competent are they? This simple exercise can save you from lot of future troubles.
7) Transparent Pricing
This is one of the most important thing to look while choosing a website host. Many hosting providers offer discounts when signing up but these low “intro” prices often jump at renewal. That can increase the burden on your wallet.
Many free features that are available during the signup may become invalid during renewal and are served as paid add-ons. That adds up to extra cost at renewal.
So, while purchasing a hosting always compare the renewal rate, what’s actually included (backups, email, CDN, migrations), and any paid add-ons (malware removal, premium SSL, WAF) that are previously free and are then changed into paid add-ons.
Paying a little more for managed features can save time and headaches but only when they are clearly mentioned. So, always do a thorough check before purchase.
Final Thoughts
Your private practice website is a key part of how clients find and trust you. Choosing the right hosting for your therapy website is the first step to build online trust and gain visibility. A reliable hosting will keep your website secure, fast, and you will remain stress-free.
A fast hosting will serve the content faster, which will aid in increasing the conversion rate.
With these seven things, you can set your practice up with a solid online foundation which can help you to focus on what you do best: helping your clients.
