Web Hosting in Charlotte, NC

A city of people who have never used you before

In a settled market, a business coasts on being known. The referral does the selling, the website confirms a decision that was already made, and nobody looks too hard at it. Charlotte does not work that way, because a large share of the people searching for you this month did not live here last year.

That changes what the site is for. It is no longer a brochure for people who already trust you. It is the entire first impression, made by somebody with no local context, no shared acquaintance and four other tabs open.

What a new arrival is actually checking

• That you exist and are still trading. A copyright year three years out of date reads as closed.
• That you cover where they now live, which they may not be able to name confidently themselves.
• That the site loads on a phone in a few seconds, because they are probably searching from one.
• That there is a real way to reach you, and some sign a person will answer it.

None of that is glamorous and none of it is expensive. It is mostly a matter of the site being current, being fast and being clear about what you do and where you do it.

If you serve a wide area, say so in plain words on the page. Somebody who moved in six weeks ago cannot tell from a map whether they are inside your radius.

Weather is the other thing that moves demand here

Summers are long, humid and thunderstorm-heavy. Winter brings the occasional ice event that shuts things down for a day or two, and the tail end of a tropical system can arrive well inland with a lot of rain behind it.

For anyone whose work depends on the weather, those days are when the website earns its keep. Traffic climbs sharply, most of it from phones, some of it on a poor connection, and often from somebody who has never visited your site before.

Almost nothing about that is a hosting problem. Pages fall over on those days because they are heavy, not because the plan is small. A homepage carrying a dozen full-size photographs will feel broken on a phone with two bars, whatever server it sits on.

• Resize images before uploading. It is the single largest improvement available and it is free.
• Turn caching on so the server hands out a finished page rather than assembling one each time.
• Make the phone number a tappable link in the header, not text inside an image.
• If you close or change hours because of weather, put that at the top of the homepage where it can be edited in a minute.

Why a Buffalo company, for a Charlotte business

It is a fair objection and it deserves a direct answer. Hosting is not a local service. Your website does not sit in Charlotte today and it will not afterwards. It lives in a data centre somewhere, and which state that is in makes no difference a visitor could notice.

So the thing you are really choosing is who picks up the phone when something is wrong, and that has nothing to do with distance. We are in Buffalo, we are on Eastern time exactly as you are, so there is no window in the day where you are waiting for an office to open. We have built and looked after websites since 1999, and we are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform.

If what you want is somebody who will drive to your office and sit down with you, we are the wrong choice and we will say so plainly. For setting up hosting, moving a site that already exists and keeping email working through the change, being in another state changes nothing at all.

The genuinely local part of your online presence is your Google Business Profile, and it is free. In a city where most searchers are new, get that right before you spend anything else.