Finding a good hosting solution for your business website can be a tricky process and one filled with technical terms. In this blog post, we cover the different types of hosting and what you should consider. What some of the hosting options mean and then discuss what to look for in a hosting company.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is when you get an account on a server shared by lots of other websites. With this type of set up you share the server resources with the other websites. Usually, on these servers, there can be several hundred websites. At peak times or when the server is under high load this can impact your site, for example, it’s load speed. Cloud hosting is the cheapest form of hosting and can cost anywhere from £0 to £250 per year.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A VPS is when you get a share of the resources of a server allocated to your website. Then you don’t have the issue where the overall server load impacts on your website. This type of hosting can cost anywhere from £200 to £700 per year.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is when you have the whole server and its resources just for your website. This is ideal for when your website uptime and speed is critical to your business and your website. Because you are using the whole server this will be the most expensive of the 3 options but will always provide the best results for your business and your website.
Understanding all the website hosting terms mean?
All hosting companies list a lot of different options on their pricing pages.
They are trying to provide information for all sorts of websites but there are a few things to look out for:
Storage
Storage these days can be found cheaply and hosts will offer way more than you’ll ever need. Unless you’re hosting lots of video files, 2-6 Gb would be fine.
Ram
In broad terms the more RAM, you use the more traffic your website will be able to support and your page speed will improve too. If you are hosting on a VPS or Dedicated server try to have at least 1 or 2 Gb of RAM.
Bandwidth
Each time one of your webpages is viewed then the size of that page and all the images included is the bandwidth that is used. So if you have a 100Mb bandwidth limit then a 1Mb page can be downloaded 100 times. Like storage, bandwidth has become much cheaper. If you’re getting a couple of thousand visits per month to your website then it’s unlikely you’ll need some than 5Gb of Bandwidth.
What do you look for in a hosting company?
Support
When you come into technical difficulties, you’ll need swift support from the hosting company. Good hosting providers will offer 24/7 support so that you can get your business back online if anything goes wrong. There are various methods of support hosting companies will provide these can including, email, telephone, live chat & online tickets.
Backup
This is a must for any website make sure you the company you choose offer backups of your website. Couple of things to look for in backups are they provided in your hosting package? Make sure the backups are copied off server too. Also how often are they doing the backups?
Location
This is also important where are the servers located. A lot of business want to keep the data of the site in the country they reside and with GDPR this is becoming an important issue of where your data is stored.
With website hosting, you get what you pay for. We would recommend VPS or look at using your web agency hosting setup as your web agency will likely have a high-end VPS or even a dedicated server that they use just for their client’s websites.
They will have an ongoing relationship with a hosting company in order to resell the hosting to there clients. We would recommend a hosting company with proven support and quick response times. Make sure they back up the websites often too.
If you would like any advice on hosting contact us.
