Let’s be clear for the get-to: If you run a business in 2018, you need to have a hosted website. Among the many reasons why you must have a hosted website, we’ll discuss three key reasons to consider a hosting service for your website.

Professional Appearance

One of the first must-have reasons for web hosting is to give your business a professional appearance. Free web hosts, like Blogspot, may be good for amateur businesses and hobbyists, but when you’re ready to do business, they’re templates and limited functionality just look substandard. After all, having .blogspot.com attached to your business name can look cumbersome.

Another reason is for outward appearances. Considering that a vast majority of business is now handled solely online, your website is equivalent to a waiting room of a physician’s office. Your first-impressions of a company are based on whether they’ve taken the time to spruce things up and make the process of doing business and getting information as smooth as possible. Free web hosts tend purposely limit their functionality as it’s part of their “freemium” business model—which tries to funnel it’s customers into purchasing web hosting as exorbitant rates.

The same approach towards professional goes for entrepreneurs who want to attract venture capital, project managers that want to attract the best employees, freelance writers that need a high-ranking SEO page to display their work, artists that fashion their website to reflect their visual aesthetic, and everyday bloggers who sell products through affiliate marketing. Whatever the industry that you work in, having a host website separates your business from the competition that doesn’t have a fully-integrated web presence.

Most people who know the basics of WordPress will immediately assume that you don’t have the means and resources. Considering that over 70 million users rely on WordPress for their online presence, chances are that even the modest clients that you wish to do business with you will know that you skimped on your web presence—a fatal flaw for dealing with top-notch businesses.

This can be a type of cognitive dissonance for those that may have a winning product and good customer relations, but a substandard website. After all, if there’s a defect in the web presence, who’s to say if that same lack of attention-to-detail carries over into the final product.

Last, a domain name that is nothing more than YourBrandName.com shows that you actually own the name. This builds authenticity and trust in your potential clients and customers that see your web presence as a logical extension of branch offices of the past. And of course, it’s easier to remember.

Greater Functionality

Hosted websites allow you to add more functionality to website than with the free services that WordPress.com kindly offers to those who don’t want to pay a relatively small monthly or yearly sum. This functionality can be anything, including the amount of templates available to non-paying users, lack of social media integration, a slower response to updates to online protocols, and so forth. The problem is that you’re at the mercy of what free web hosts dictate, which can even be related to network security. Choosing a free web host can put your website at a liability for information breaches and hackers. With a dedicated web host, especially by picking the best wordpress hosting service you can find, ensures that your website protects and enhances your business.

Additionally, you may regularly engage your audience through social media. As you may have experienced, not every social media plugin is compatible with freemium web hosts (for the same reason that some plugins have the paid services). This can stunt the growth of your website, where riding the crest of emerging trends can mean responding to your audience’s feedback, comments, and interaction.

And it may surprise you to know that if you do achieve a large following and regular traffic to your website, you can’t sell your website by using free web hosts. The devil lies in the details of the “Terms and Conditions,” where users are typically

Even secretly “gifting” a website to another person can result in the website being removed from a search engine’s ranking and taken down entirely—the worst of both worlds.

Growth and Scaling

While startups are renowned for bootstrapping their businesses with smallest of resources, a website should be made as a priority—even over other essentials. The reason is that startups can experience rapid growth after securing venture capital, but not before having their branding in place before offering their business to outside investment. By securing a domain name from a hosting service, it shows due diligence and that your team understands the basics of modern commerce. This also helps anticipate problems from a domain name being taken by a cunning entrepreneur that knows that your business relies on it for its eventually marketing and branding efforts.

Another reason for securing a web host goes along with the previous point: professionalism in terms of growth and scaling. After all, if you have a free web host that doesn’t allow you to fully advertise your new innovative app, you may miss out on an opportunity to gain traction in the market. This is a fatal maneuver, especially in the hyper-competitive industries that startups flock towards.

Also, don’t forget that as your startup grows and becomes more of a full-fledged company, building the web infrastructure beforehand saves many headaches and time, especially when downtime needs to be minimized (something that migrating servers is notorious for inflicting on businesses). Being able to be at the cutting-edge of web developments from the beginning—only possible through dedicated web hosting—ensures that your new app is compliant with new tech and your website is outfitted to display properly on new devices. After all, nothing says yesterday’s news like compatibility issues. Customers in the 21^st century don’t have time to wait for your business to catch up. Instead, they’ll move on at the slightest instance of becoming “old hat”.