The simple answer is yes – and more so now than ever, following the stay‐at‐home orders and trading restrictions on mall and main street businesses throughout 2021. Companies with an online presence have traditionally received higher levels of customer, brand recognition, and website growth than purely high street enterprises. Eighty per cent of customers consult search engines before making a significant purchase, and a website will define your brand’s appearance in search engine results.

Having a website brings other benefits, such as appearing in local search results. It helps potential customers access your business information from their mobile devices, finding you while they’re on the go. Whether you need to build a website to sell products online, or to support a garage business, Westhost can help you get online and into the higher echelons of search engine results. You can see more about Westhost’s web hosting options here.

Westhost clients receive instant access to 24‐hour technical support, with expert staff standing by to answer any questions you may have about your products or services. Additionally, the Westhost knowledgebase and blog contain answers to many of the most frequently asked questions among our customers.

Absolutely! Our Website Builder is a user‐friendly website building tool that allows people with no technical knowledge to build a website for themselves or their business in a matter of minutes. If you already have your domain name registered with Midphase and you are creating a brand new site, then your website builder and hosting account should be up and running in no time.

WordPress is the world’s leading Content Management System (CMS), and it’s been used to create almost 40% of all websites which are currently live around the world. WordPress is one of the easiest ways to build a website, eCommerce shop or blog. There are thousands of easy‐to‐customize templates, with 58,000 plugins each performing a specific role, and you add these plugins to the basic WordPress framework as and when you need them. They handle everything from image galleries to eCommerce checkouts, from accelerated page loading to antivirus protection.

As an open‐source platform, WordPress is supported by thousands of experts around the globe and a thriving online community. While Westhost is immensely proud of our website builder, we recognize some people are already familiar using WordPress. That’s why we offer three dedicated WordPress hosting packages, helping customers to get online with a free domain and reliable hosting. Find out more about Westhost’s WordPress hosting packages here.

Westhost was founded in 1998, and we’ve been evolving in response to changing trends and technical requirements ever since. When we started helping people with their online presence, there was no global supervision of domain name registration, and little in the way of email spam filtering. There was no broadband connectivity, social media was non‐existent, and WordPress was five years away from being launched.

Over the years, we’ve improved and revised our services as technologies have advanced. Our website-building platform uses the latest drag‐and‐drop functionality to create stunning websites with no coding knowledge required, and our email hosting services automatically screen messages for the latest spam and malware. We’ve helped small businesses capitalize on the meteoric growth in eCommerce and online store creation, and we’ve embraced the cloud with services like IMAP email.

With 1.7 billion websites currently live around the world, there’s a good chance your ideal domain name is already registered to another company. If it is, you could try adopting a different TLD, like .today or .ltd. You could add a word onto your brand name to indicate your industry or location – mybrandnamebuffalo.com, for instance. Or you could shorten your domain name – mbnbuffalo.com. You might even be able to buy a domain name that’s been parked (left sitting idle) by its current owner, though this can be expensive and may involve complex negotiations.

We are part of a family of businesses known collectively as The Hut Group. THG has a presence around the world, and our sister brands include bare metal server provider IngenuityCloudServices.com and our virtual private server partner VPS.NET. At the same time, Westhost still operates as a stand-alone brand, giving our customers a single point of contact.

Westhost offers each customer space on a shared server, meaning the contents of your website and email are securely stored on the same giant hard drives as other unrelated companies in different industries. Sharing resources helps to bring down the cost of our hosting services, while ensuring every client has plenty of resources at their disposal at any given moment.

As companies grow, they might want the greater control and customization available from a dedicated server of their own. If this is something your business could benefit from, our sister brand THG Hosting is able to offer bare metal servers which can be configured to your exact customization, with up to 10Gbps connectivity and over 30 global data centers. Click here to see how THG Hosting can host and support enterprise‐level businesses, with top‐tier GPU servers and industry‐leading bare metal hardware.