Low contention hosting: why it's the secret to online success

When you’re running a business, the speed and reliability of your website has a direct impact on your commercial success. It affects everything. Your user experience and conversion rate, even your search engine rankings.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re involved in e-commerce, marketing and consultancy, apps and web development, providing online services or relying on a booking system. Either way, your customers want to find what they need, and they want to find it fast.

Not only will a slow-loading website harm your business, it will push your potential customers into the waiting arms of your competitors.

But no amount of website optimisation will make up for an inadequate hosting plan.

That’s why you need to be thinking about contention.

What is contention in web hosting?

Contention in web hosting occurs when different companies are sharing the same common infrastructure.

The contention ratio refers to the number of companies involved. For example, a contention ratio of 1:500 means the available resource is being shared between 500 different companies.

If your service provider has a large number of customers all competing for the same server resources, that means your contention ratio is high. Your connection quality and speed will drop when demand for the shared resource exceeds the available supply. And that isn’t good.

Conversely, low contention hosting means there are fewer users per server, which leads to improved performance, heightened reliability and happier customers for you.

The benefits of low contention

There are many advantages to having a low contention ratio for your business. More bandwidth is available on the network at all times, meaning that you’ll enjoy:

• Improved website performance and page speed
• Increased reliability to build trust and customer loyalty
• Less downtime, for uninterrupted access to critical resources, data and services
• Better handling of traffic spikes and high load periods
• Enhanced security and data integrity
• Better scalability for site expansion or increased storage needs

Low-contention versus high-contention hosting

Contention matters. It matters a lot. Everything about low contention has a direct positive impact on your customers. And when you’re in a high-contention situation, the reverse is true.

With high contention, your existing customers are likely to have a bad online experience. Your potential to attract new customers is also greatly impeded. In addition, your search rankings will be impacted, and your online business could become trapped in a cycle of decline.

When choosing a cloud provider, it’s vital that they can offer you a low contention ratio.

The technical details of low contention

We’ve explored the fact that low contention allocates more resources to your business, but what does that actually mean?

With better resource availability you’ll have faster access to:

• The central processing unit (CPU), which will be able to interpret, process and execute your instructions quicker
• Random-access memory (RAM), which is the temporary memory bank used by the CPU to process tasks
• Storage, where all the digital data relating to your website is saved

By having unhindered access to all these building blocks that form your online presence, your visitors will be free from bottlenecks, service disruption and slow page loading.

Build your business on strong foundations

Our low-contention promise is one of the things that makes Krystal different.

On every single one of our business hosting plans, we guarantee that you will never share your resources with more than 100 other businesses. It’s that simple.

We also offer cloud-first hosting as standard, while some of our competitors charge you more.

So, when choosing your web hosting partner, make sure you make a low-contention decision. It’s the best move for your business.