Best Real Estate Website Hosting
In this internet age, the vast majority of real estate buyers do their property search online. This makes it extremely important for real estate agents and businesses to have an online presence.
In the past, showing a property was a purely physical affair. Today, however, buyers can tour a property virtually and scope out the entire floor plan without having to visit the property.
Real estate has gone digital, and you need your own real estate website to build your online presence. The first step to launching your online presence is to secure a web host for your site, and that’s why we have written this article on the best real estate website hosting.
This article will show you how to choose the right real estate web hosting provider and help you discover the best web hosts for your real estate website.
Evergreen Growth Marketing occasionally links to product and/or services offered by vendors to assist you with all your marketing needs. Some of these may be affiliate links, meaning we earn a small commission if items are purchased. Check our terms here.
Contents
How to Choose a Real Estate Web Hosting Provider
It is clear that you need an online presence as a real estate agent to thrive in this digital age. However, many agents already have online profiles on their broker’s website and they get much of their business from referrals and repeat clients. If you are such a realtor, you may be wondering why you still need a website?
Should a Realtor Have a Website?
The answer is a big yes.
Why? You need to have a real estate website because your customers and prospective clients expect you to have one.
A 2018 study by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) shows that 44% of buyers first researched their property online before making a purchase. If you want to meet the expectations of the buyers of today, you need a website.
Below are three other important reasons why you need a real estate website:
Brand Recognition and Local SEO
A website will make it easy for buyers and other potential clients in your geographical area to find you. If you work with a web design and marketing agency to optimize your real estate website for local SEO, you can rank on the first page of local search results.
If you lack a real estate website, your online brand recognition will lag behind those of your competitors.
The best you can hope for is to appear on the list of agents of your broker’s sites. However, with so many agents, it will be difficult to stand out.
To Generate New Leads
A real estate website can be central to your marketing strategy as a platform for building awareness about your business and generating leads. A well-designed website will have landing pages that are optimized to convert visitors into leads.
You will be able to build your email list and reach out to everyone that signed up for your newsletter with promotional offers and useful content.
You can also work with a marketing agency to develop a content marketing strategy. Buyers and renters are always looking for quality information on real estate, and the content you publish on your website blog will make these potential clients discover your business.
Customer Support
Having a personal website gives you an online platform to provide your contact information and other helpful resources for your clients.
Your website is the place to publish virtual tours and pictures of your property listings. You can also publish FAQs and other valuable information on your website to help buyers and renters navigate the real estate process.
Why is it Necessary to Choose a Good Web Host?
You know already that you need a web host before you can launch your real estate website, but why should you be careful when choosing a web host?
Your website needs to be hosted somewhere, and a web hosting company provides rented space for you to store the files of your website. There are many web hosting companies out there, but not all of them are reliable.
Choosing the wrong web hosting company can severely impact your online presence, and below are some of the things that could happen if you make the wrong choice:
- Revenue Losses: research shows that each hour of downtime costs small businesses over $10,000. If you choose an unreliable host and your site is always suffering outages, your clients and prospective buyers won’t be able to reach out to you.
- Rank Demotion on Search Engines: if your website is slow or becomes infected by malware because of the defective services of your web host, search engines will penalize your site, and demote you on search rankings
- Loss of Files: the best web host companies are established companies that have built trust and credibility over many years. If you choose an unreliable web host that suddenly goes extinct, you will lose all your files and the virtual office that clients already associate with your brand.
To help you choose the right web host for your real estate site, we have outlined the key factors to consider below.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Real Estate Web Hosting Provider
Scalable Hosting Plans
The aim of every real estate business is to grow, and as your business expands, you will need a scalable hosting plan to match the growth of your website and the increase in traffic.
When evaluating your options, look for hosting providers offering tiered plans. A tiered plan system will make it easy for you to choose a plan that best fits your current storage & feature needs. You can scale to a more advanced plan as your website grows.
Customer Support
This is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing your web host. You don’t want to be in a situation where your website has a technical breakdown and the phones of your web host are not working or the customer support staff are not responding to your chat messages.
Go for a hosting provider that offers 24/7 technical support and has been vetted by review sites to have a quick response time.
Downtime
This is when your website is offline, usually for scheduled maintenance. The issue with downtime is that when your site is offline, prospective clients will not be able to see it, and this could cost you potential new customers.
No web host can guarantee 100% uptime, but the hosting provider you choose must guarantee a minimum of 99% uptime.
Security
This is one issue you cannot afford to neglect when weighing your options. If your hosting provider does not have best-in-class security features, your site can be hacked and held to ransom.
Malware can also infect a website that is not adequately protected, and Google will penalize and demote any website that is infected with malware.
Value for Money
Your goal should be to select the hosting provider that offers the best balance of features and customer support at an affordable price.
Read reviews and compare your options, but don’t go for the cheapest option by default. Remember, quality services cost money, and you don’t want to pay a cheap subscription fee today and pay a much higher price tomorrow to fix your website.
Top Web Hosting Providers for Real Estate
A2 Hosting
We know you are busy closing contracts, and to make it easy for you, we have compiled a list of the top web hosting providers for real estate websites.
A2 hosting has spent the past two decades establishing itself as the fastest and most reliable web hosting solution on the market.
It is not as popular as other hosting companies like Bluehost and Godaddy, but it leads the industry in speed and it has outstanding customer service.
This web host has everything you need for your real estate website, and your site visitors will enjoy how fast your site runs.
Features
- Blazing fast turbo server
- 99.9% uptime
- Automated backups
- Free site migration
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- 24/7 customer support
- Speed optimized WordPress hosting plan
Pros
- Speed: it is nearly twice as fast as most of its competitors
- Enhanced Security: the website runs a perpetual security initiative that uses HackScan for protection from malware and KernelCare to update the security features of your site.
- 24/7 Customer Support: there is an online knowledgebase for users and 24/7 phone, email, and live chat support.
Cons
- The basic plans are limited and do not use the fastest servers
- You must pay separately for your domain name
- You have to pay extra to fully utilize the website builder
Pricing
A2 hosting offers four different categories of hosting plans including Shared Hosting, VPS hosting, Reseller hosting, and Dedicated hosting. It also offers a special speed-optimized WordPress hosting plan that starts from $2.99/month and goes up from there depending on your needs.
The Shared hosting plan is a type of hosting where you share a single server with other users, and it is the cheapest type of web hosting. The A2 shared hosting plan has the same pricing plan as the WordPress hosting plan.
The VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting plan is a type of hosting that offers an independent portion of the server to each user. It is a good option for users that want to install custom software that is not provided by the web host. The A2 VPS hosting plan starts from $4.99/month and goes up to $39.99/month.
The dedicated hosting plan is a type of plan where you have complete control over an entire server that is not shared with any other user. It is a good option for users that want enhanced security and are expecting heavy site traffic. The A2 Dedicated hosting plan starts from around $99/month and goes as high as $140 or more.
Big Scoots
Bigscoots is a fully managed hosting solution for your real estate website. At Evergreen Growth Marketing, we use A2 Hosting and Bigscoots for most of our clients in the real estate industry.
Bigscoots hosting is special because they are a human-to-human company. You will have an expert dedicated to your website who will manage your system and will provide you with round-the-clock support.
Features
- Fully managed website hosting
- 24/7 customer support for the 365 days of the year
- 99.9% uptime
- Free SSL certificates
- Free Email
- Free site migration
- 45-day guarantee
Pros
- World-class protection from malware
- Excellent customer support
- Excellent Knowledge base articles
- Managed WordPress plan on dedicated virtual servers
Cons
- The shared plans have relatively limited storage
- Expensive for users that don’t need managed hosting
Pricing
Bigscoots offers four categories of fully managed hosting plans including Shared hosting, WordPress hosting, Cloud VPS hosting, and Dedicated hosting.
The Shared Hosting plan starts from $5.95/month and up depending on your needs.
The Managed WordPress Hosting plan starts at around $34/month and can go up from there.
The Cloud VPS plan starts at around $54/month and goes up from there depending on your needs, while the Dedicated hosting plan starts at $230/month and goes up from there.
Siteground
SiteGround is one of the more popular web hosting providers, and that’s largely because it excels at everything you would expect from a web host.
You will enjoy flawless site performance, best-in-class security, excellent customer support, and premium features you won’t find with other hosting providers.
The customer support system is exceptional. The support staff are highly trained, you can see who you are chatting with, and you can view how other customers have rated the services of that customer care staff.
Features
- Free site builder
- 24/7 customer support
- 30-day guarantee
- 99.9% uptime
- Automated daily backups
- Free email
- Support for WordPress and Weebly
Pros
- Staging area support that lets you create clones of your website to test new features
- Best-in-class customer service
- Daily automated backups
Cons
- No support for Windows servers
- No VPS server
- Relatively low storage
Pricing
SiteGround offers several categories of hosting plans, but the plans you should be interested in are the Shared Hosting and Managed WordPress plans.
Both plans start from $6.99/month and can go up to $14.99/month.
Bluehost
Bluehost caters to over 2million websites, and that in itself is sufficient evidence of the quality of their services.
It is endorsed by WordPress and offers one of the most affordable hosting packages in the industry. If you are looking for an affordable web hosting solution for your real estate website, this should be your choice.
Features
- Cost-effective solution
- Free site builder
- Custom cPanel for site administration
- 99.99% uptime
- 24/7 customer support
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain name
- Free CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Pros
- Affordable pricing
- Custom control panel is easy to use
- World-class malware protection
Cons
- No automated backups
- The basic plan has very limited features
- No support for Windows servers
Pricing
Bluehost offers three hosting plans including Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting.
The Shared hosting plan starts at $2.75/month and can go up to $13.95/month.
The VPS plan starts at $19.99/month while the Dedicated hosting plan starts at $79.99/month.
InMotion
InMotion is a feature-packed web hosting solution that is optimized for speed, reliability, and security.
It comes with a drag-and-drop website builder – BoldGrid that lets you set up and launch your website in minutes. You don’t need any coding skills to use the site builder, and it integrates seamlessly with WordPress.
Features
- Website builder
- Multiple websites for the basic plan
- Free SSL certificate
- 99.95% uptime
- Security suite
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Automated backups
Pros
- Excellent customer support
- 90-day money-back guarantee
- Google Apps integration
Cons
- No monthly plans for Shared hosting and WordPress hosting
- No support for windows servers
- Plan packages are more expensive at renewal
Pricing
InMotion offers Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting plans.
The Shared hosting plan starts from $6.99/month for the 1-year plan and $5.99/month for the 2-year plan.
The WordPress hosting plan starts from $8.99/month for the 1-year plan, and $6.99/month for the 2-year plan.
The VPS hosting plan starts at $75.99/month while the Dedicated hosting plan starts at $229.99/month.
How Much Will it Cost to Build a Real Estate Website?
You now know how much it will cost to host your real estate site, but you want to know the cost of the entire website project. It starts at around $2500 and can reach $15,000 depending on the complexity of your real estate website.
Some of the important factors that affect the costs are:
- Website design
- Content creation
- Web hosting
- Website development and CMS integration
- Integration of IDX tools
- Ongoing maintenance
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right web host is not difficult provided you evaluate your options based on the factors outlined in this blog post. This article has also shown you five of the best hosting providers for real estate businesses.
Now it’s up to you to use this information to choose the best web host for your site. However, if you need any help with the process, you can work with us at Evergreen Growth Marketing.
We are a Raleigh NC SEO web design and marketing services company that provides WordPress website design, SEO, and website maintenance services. Get in touch with us today, and let’s start building your online presence.
