How to Choose the Right Hosting Company for Your Estate Agency Website

Unlike a simple brochure site, your estate agency website has a lot going on under the bonnet. 

Property feeds, valuation tools, booking forms, live chat, videos – it all stacks up. 

And every second counts. If your website is slow to load, potential clients won’t wait. They’ll click back to the search results and check out one of your competitors instead. 

Not ideal. 

That’s why choosing a reliable hosting company with the right features is key. Let’s break down what you should be looking for.

Speed

Site performance is directly linked to conversion rates and bounce rates. If your property listings or homepage images take too long to load, your prospects might assume you’re a bit behind the times – even if that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Hosting plays a big part in page speed. While optimising image sizes and using good site design helps, even the best-optimised website can’t perform on sluggish hosting.

Look for a hosting company that offers:

• Solid-State Drives (SSD): Faster than old-school hard drives.
• Server-side caching: To deliver pages more efficiently.
• UK-based data centres: Crucial for a UK audience like buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants in your local area.

Uptime Guarantees and Reliability

Your website needs to be available around the clock – even if your office isn’t.

Check the provider’s uptime guarantee. Ideally, you want 99.9% uptime or better. Anything less and you risk your website being offline at the worst possible time – like when a landlord decides to search for a new agency on a Sunday night.

Also consider support availability. Do they offer 24/7 support? Can you get through to a human quickly when something goes wrong?

Security

In the property sector, trust is everything. Your clients are handing over sensitive information via forms and valuation tools. That means you have a responsibility to keep that data safe.

At the very least, your hosting provider should offer:

• Free SSL certificates (that little padlock in the address bar)
• Regular backups, ideally daily
• Malware scanning and automatic security updates

If you’re collecting data through enquiry forms, valuation tools or newsletter sign-ups, security and compliance aren’t optional extras – they’re legal requirements under GDPR.

Scalability

Maybe your current website gets a few hundred visits a week. But what happens when your digital marketing efforts start pulling in serious traffic and that goes up by a factor of ten, or fifty, or even more?

Your hosting should be able to grow with your agency. 

Look for packages that allow you to upgrade easily – from shared hosting to VPS or cloud solutions – without migrating everything to a different provider. Some even offer automatic scaling, which is ideal if you’re planning to grow aggressively.

Compatibility with Estate Agency Platforms

Whatever CRM platform you’re using, whether it be Reapit, Dezrez, or any of the many others out there, your hosting needs to be compatible with the systems that power your listings. 

Some providers specialise in WordPress hosting, which works well for agencies using WordPress-based sites with property plugins.

If you’re using a custom platform or third-party software for listing updates or valuations, it’s worth checking if there are any specific hosting requirements (like PHP versions or memory limits) – and that your provider can support them.

Do You Need Managed Hosting?

Managed hosting means your provider handles the technical side of things – updates, security patches, backups – so you don’t have to.

For a busy estate agency, this can be a game-changer. Instead of panicking because your site’s gone down or trying to figure out how to fix a plugin error, you’ve got support on hand to keep everything running smoothly.

It’s usually a bit more expensive than unmanaged hosting, but the time and stress it saves can make it more than worth it.

Price vs Performance

Of course, cost is a factor. But while it’s tempting to go with the cheapest option, be careful. Ultra-budget hosting often means shared servers with limited resources, no support, and a slow website.

Ask yourself: How many instructions would I need for better hosting to pay for itself? The answer is probably “not many”.

Treat your website like the revenue-generating asset it is, and invest accordingly.