The Importance of Web Hosting
Your web hosting service should be a top priority in your overall website strategy. It will determine the outcome of your website performance, security and overall customer experience. Often times, the web hosting service is not considered during the website design.
Topics we will cover:
Why is Web Hosting Important
What are the types of Web Hosting
For business websites – choose wisely
Why is Web Hosting Important
Here’s a typical scenario. You are ready to go put your site online. You’ve got an idea of what you want your website to look like and you proceed to contact a web designer. You get a quote back for your design, ranging from $2,000 – $5,000,possibly higher depending on your vision. Your designer builds it on their temporary server and you proceed to seek a web host. You begin to research web hosting and find some of the popular web hosting companies, like
- GoDaddy
- BlueHost
- HostGator
At this point, as most people do, you base your decision on the best price and value. You see unlimited everything, $5 a month and so on. But what is not realized is the type of web hosting is being purchased. It’s not that the web hosting companies are evil or pulled one over on you, it’s a matter of understanding what you are paying for.
Most of these affordable and unlimited everything plans are selling you a Shared Web Hosting Plan. Your website and all subsequent websites will be on a shared web server. This means your account is on a shared space with other customers. Think of a condominium. Most of your resources are shared.
Learn more about Shared Web Hosting.
You have spent good money on a website and now you are putting it on a basic web hosting service, that can compromise your web strategy. How?
- Because you are sharing resources, another website can monopolize the CPU processing, RAM (memory); resulting in a slow website for you
- If a website is attacked by malware, software virus or hacked; your site is next or at higher risk.
- Poor performance will affect your SEO ranking and customer experience; leading them to leave your site
- Higher Security risks, can lead to added repair/recovery costs or downtime; resulting in lost opportunity
It’s important to know what you are buying and understand how the web hosting service directly relates to the vision or execution of your website strategy. If your goal is to use your website for business and get more business, you can begin to understand the importance of getting the right web hosting plan.
Different Types of Web Hosting
What other choices do you have? You have several. You already have an idea of what is shared web hosting. The next two would be virtual servers and dedicated servers.
Virtual Servers are isolated virtual environment that provide you with dedicated resources, dedicated space and total control of your web hosting environment. In recent years, virtual servers have become more available and affordable. A big advantage of virtual servers is that if the hardware fails, the virtual server can either automatically move to new hardware or be easily migrated to one. It features better redundancy. With performance and security improving, virtual servers are more popular than ever than the dedicated servers.
Dedicated Servers are physical hardware servers. It is the original web hosting method and one of the best ways to improve performance and security. Imagine your server is physically isolated and connected to the Network. It pretty much works just like the virtual server. It is much more expensive than virtual servers and does not have the ability to migrate easily to another physical server. When a dedicated server goes down, the tech team must physically remove it and replace or repair. You now have to pay the tech team and buy new hardware.
Learn more
Choosing the Best Web Hosting For Your Business
Hopefully, you are at a point of understanding and grasp how a basic web hosting service (shared) may not be the most ideal plan for your business website. Lets face it, our customers begin their search on the web these days and your website needs to be fast, secure and online.
What should you be looking for? Or asking yourself?
- As your website traffic grows, you add more content and software; will your website perform well?
- With a high risk of a security breach, or at the onslaught of an attack, will your site survive?
- Can you afford to miss lost opportunities when your site is slow to render pages, site is offline or not ranking well in Google?
Overall for it’s ease of use, redundant architecture and affordability; clearly a best value, the virtual server is the best option for a business, relying on their website for lead generation, customer service for customers and educating prospective new customers.
Why a virtual server?
- With dedicated resources, your site is much faster
- With an isolated environment, your site is better protected
- Improved performance, security & redundancy equates to improved sales, conversions and better service.
Conclusion
When design or developing your website, include web hosting as part of your strategy. If you are bootstrapped, we aren’t saying Shared Web hosting is bad, just understand what comes with your choice. Just don’t blame your web host, they are doing their job. And don’t make the mistake of going to another shared web hosting company. It’s not them, it’s the web hosting configuration. It’s time to move on when your Shared Web hosting has got you down.
Ideally, if you can budget for a thousand dollar website, might as well include web hosting as part of the overall budget. Maybe you can give up a few things on the first phase of your website and add them later? Consider, if you start with a basic hosting service, you will have to migrate your whole site to another hosting service. That requires additional costs, possible downtime and the pain of troubleshooting problems.
Our last point. Imagine customizing your car. Great custom paint job, aerodynamic body kits, performance tires and rims. You’ve spent thousands of dollars on the look of your car. Your car was designed to be put on a American Classic, the all-new Dodge Challenger or the latest Chevy Camaro or the legendary Ford Mustang. Yet, you choose to put it on a Honda Civic. 🙂
Price vs Performance is key in any hosting decision. Shared hosting from some of the bigger companies are commodities. The differentiator is not price (everyone is trying to be low-cost) but service and support. When you see reviews for for shared hosting services like the ones you name, the bottom line after price is: “where they there for me when I had a problem?” Always a key point. Next point is performance. Logic dictates that a private network can be “tuned” to maximize speed and security. So, VPS is a great way to go if you’re not buying with ONLY your wallet. The next question is support. Very very important in my book.
Thanks Jay for your comment and you touch on key points. I think a VPS is a must and shared hosting on a finely tuned VPS is good too. This is why we are opening up a Koomohost Partner program to help Reseller’s provide quality shared hosting and thank you for being our first reseller! 🙂