When it comes to hosting your website it is important that you have a few things in place to make sure that your website is doing what you need it to. Here are a few helpful pointers, all of which we build into our own hosting that we provide.
Cloud Hosting
You may have heard many things about Cloud Hosting, but basically what you need to know is that instead of your websites files and data being hosted on one single server, it is instead hosted on many servers distributed across the world. It is this distribution that makes ‘the cloud’ and provides you protection. How does it do this? Well basically it protects you from the server hardware or software failing. If you were hosting your site on one physical server and it failed then your website would go offline and possibly you may also lose all your data as well if it isn’t properly backed up.
The other advantage of cloud hosting is that it is easy to upgrade the server size and performance without needing to physically move to a new server.
We use expert hosting providers SiteGround for our hosting and as standard all our websites are hosted in a shared cloud hosting environment. But we can also provide affordable dedicated cloud hosting if you want your site to have completely dedicated hosting resources.
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is when many websites are all housed within the same server. This makes hosting very affordable, particularly if you have a website that doesn’t experience extremely high volumes of traffic. In a cloud environment, where hosting resources can easily be scaled to meet the needs of many sites, this is a good way for websites with only moderate hosting requirements to keep costs down.
What are the disadvantages? The main consideration with a shared hosting environment is that all of the server resources are shared. So if a site gets a spike in traffic that requires more server resources in order to cope then this could briefly slow the server down and this means every site on the server will be affected, not just the site with the increased traffic.
Should I have dedicated hosting?
If you have a website that is critical to your business and you need it to be functioning at 100% all of the time, or if you have regular spikes in traffic and large amounts of processing that the site needs to undertake then you should definitely consider having dedicated hosting, rather than being in a shared environment. The good thing is that dedicated hosting is easy to arrange and doesn’t have to break the bank, but you will be looking at paying more and you will need to make sure you have all the maintenance and server management being taken care of as well.
Although as standard our sites are hosted in a shared environment, we offer a range of different dedicated hosting options. If you’d like to discuss these then get in touch for further details.
Dedicated Server Management and Installs
Although as standard our sites are on a shared environment, each site has its own dedicated account space within the server, completely segregated from other sites. This includes a dedicated CPanel (the software that manages the server) account. This is important because it allows us to manage each site individually. We can install whatever software we wish for an individual site and give individual access to 3rd party agencies or personnel if our clients are using other people to deliver some of their services.
This approach is a great way to allow websites to be individually managed and not have to fit into the same mould as all the other sites. Each site we have has its own software installed, for example WordPress CMS, its own SSL, caching and CloudFlare arrangements. No individual site is reliant or limited by any other individual site on the server.
Why is this important? Because it provides flexibility for you, or us, to do what we need to do with any given site without putting limitations in place.
