Over the past several years, cloud hosting has come to transform the way many businesses work.
By shifting their operations away from cumbersome, costly, and fairly inflexible in-house servers towards a much more scalable and affordable solution in the cloud, these companies are enjoying the kind of increase in productivity, profitability, and security they previously thought impossible.
Yet as much as cloud hosting benefits those other businesses, you may not yet be convinced that it’s right for your therapy practice.
Whether it’s concerns about cloud hosting costs, dealing with the trials and tribulations of setting up something that sounds pretty technical or simply the fact that you’ve already got your heart set on another way to host your website, there are all kinds of reasons why you may have no interest in using the cloud to host your therapy practice website.
To be honest, none of those concerns are really anything to worry about.
Not only is cloud hosting reasonably well-priced these days, but it’s also much easier to configure than you might think and offers a tonne of benefits that other forms of web hosting simply can’t match.
Here are just some of the things your therapy practice can do better, faster, and safer by moving to the cloud:
1. Online Selling
I could dedicate the rest of this article to covering the numerous advantages of cloud hosting to eCommerce businesses and still not having room to cover everything.
For now, then, I’ll simply say that whether you’re looking to accept session payments via your website or use that platform to sell books, downloads, or other products, cloud hosting is going to prove invaluable.
The main reason for this is scalability and the fact that you only ever need to pay for what you really need.
For one thing, this presents an opportunity to start small, and gradually grow your hosting at the same rate as your business.
There’s even the flexibility to temporarily increase your setup, say to cover heavy sales numbers over the holiday period- before dropping back to a more modest solution for the rest of the year.
For another thing, this pay-as-you-go approach levels the playing field, meaning that even if your practice is new on the market, you can enjoy all the same resources as your well-established rivals, all at a fraction of the cost.
2. Rich Media
Now more than ever, today’s internet users have come to businesses like yours to provide them with the information they need in a variety of formats, including HD video and images.
Maybe you’ve catered to that demand by creating infographics, a video series, or other rich media.
That’s a great start, but it’s worth pointing out here that media files can be a big drain on the server resources offered by most bog standard cheap hosting plans, meaning they may struggle to serve that content to your customers in a quick and seamless way.
In other words, all that effort in creating your content may well have been for nought if your visitors can’t enjoy that content without it taking forever to load or lagging.
With the cloud, that’s never an issue. Your customers can stream fast, high-definition video, audio, and other digital content, all without impacting your other core services.
3. Improved Performance and Security
The same goes for your website presence as a whole.
When potential clients head to your website, they expect the whole thing to load quickly. They also expect that any data they input into your site will be collected and stored safely.
Fail to provide that, and they’re unlikely to stick around for much longer.
Again, hosting in the cloud really comes into its element here, providing greater speed and reliability than physical servers, along with inbuilt security features to ensure your customers’ data is well protected.
4. Cloud Hosting Content Storage
Making remote working and anywhere, anytime access to your files, folders, and applications much easier and affordable, cloud hosting also has the advantage that, should things go wrong, disaster recovery is only ever a click away.
5. Domain Name Systems (DNS)
Simplicity is the key here. Moving your DNS to the cloud, you’ll find it easier than ever before to manage and configure your domains, all through one simple-to-use interface.
6. Online and offline application
Whether it’s consumer applications you’ve developed to engage your customers through mobiles and tablets or mission-critical software needed to run your entire back-end operation, you again have a wealth of resizable hosting solutions that allow your teams to deliver the best possible service for your customers.
Not sure if moving to the cloud is right for you? Looking for other options to launch your therapy practice website? Check out my complete beginner’s guide to web hosting for therapists.
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