Website hosting and why is it required?
Website hosting is one of those elements that can often be glossed over when people talk about website design, this is mainly because the cost of hosting is often minor compared to the overall costs of the website design.
It is important to note that without website hosting you cannot have a website that clients can find. Website hosting is best thought as a home where your website can live with its given address, housed in a large server centre with thousands of other websites, each hosting area with their different sizes, features, abilities, and cost.
So, what’s the difference between the various website hosting services that are on offer and how do they compare in price?
Well simply put… a website hosting service which is not powerful enough for your website can lead to a slow website or a website with errors, but this is not a cause for alarm as there is always the option to upgrade your hosting service.
The above is not however a call to now go out and get the most powerful website hosting service you can find, as this may prove to be an expensive exercise. The general rule is the more powerful the website hosting service the higher the cost and there is a point where your website design maybe sitting on a server and only using a fraction of the resources on offer.
Shared, Cloud or Dedicated?
Most web hosting services are shared, this is where your website will sit on a server along with many others. This type of website hosting is ideal for 80% of all websites, as long as there are enough resources on the server to handle all of the websites it houses. When you sign up to one of these shared systems you are given a set CPU, ram and bandwidth limit and expected to run your website with these limits. With cost being a benefit there are usually a few downsides to this type of hosting service.
Speed of your website can be slow if the server is overloaded or it lacks speed enhancing elements like Redis, LiteSpeed or Memcached, there is also no control over what other websites are also housed on the same system.
Cloud hosting services are a bit more modern and contain the ability to easily scale your package to suit your requirements, our personal favourite for this is Amazon Web Services as moving up in server resources is easy. With the advantage of speed and the use of Redis this system can easily host small simple websites to large ecommerce websites without any problems.
We have 2 AWS systems setup, one with cPanel which makes clients lives a little easier and one using AWS LightSail WordPress which offers a bit more speed while sacrificing the user-friendly setup.
The downside to AWS (Amazon Web Services) comes in the form of the setup and maintenance. Setting up AWS does require a knowledge of coding. We also find AWS to be a little protective over email use and how their servers block sending emails from websites using the standard port 25, this however can be overcome.
Finally, we come to a dedicated hosting system, this is where one website sits on one server benefiting from 100% of what the server has to offer, rarely do we use these as they are of a high cost and too powerful for 99% of all websites requirements.
So which hosting service is best for my Website Design?
We offer a few choices for our website hosting services like many other companies to try and make sure that there is the right server for your budget and website design.
Our favourite when designing websites is to use our AWS cPanel hosting system which gives us the ability to monitor exactly what resources each website needs.
When choosing your website hosting service just make sure that it is within your budget and has the exact requirements your website needs for it to run quickly and without fault.
And remember… website hosting provides the space for a website designer to design your website.
