You assembled a rockstar team of UI/UX designers, web developers, marketers and web copy strategists to put together a captivating new website for your company…time to take it live right? Yes, 100% right…so let’s just upload it to the cheapest cloud hosting option available and watch the visitors roll in and consume our content. It’s no-brainer, nothing to really think about there….
…..right?
For those who know what a cPanel is or have dealt with web hosting providers…or even been bombarded with ads related to hosting, you probably already know that not all web hosts provide the same level or service. This article is however meant to enlighten you on the consequences of thinking: “I just need a host for my site that will get the thing online so that anyone can view it in their browser, that’s it!”
To this thinking I say, there’s a lot more thinking you need to do here. I know, you’re probably a functioning adult with 10s of other things to think about…but if you intend to have an online presence, your attention should not start and stop at how your website looks. Where your website lives is equally and arguably even more important! Let’s talk about why.
The first thing to know/learn about hosting is the difference between dedicated and shared hosting. Shared hosting will usually be the cheaper option, but what happens under the hood is your website will be set up on a server that 100 other websites live on, all sharing the same CPU, memory and storage resources hence potentially having the following side-effects:
Slow loading time:Â sharing resources means there’s less resources available to your website to load faster for potential visitors. Anyone waiting more than 5 seconds for your page to load will move on…and that’s your loss.
Highly vulnerable to attack: sharing the same server with tens if not hundreds of other sites makes it easier for you to get hacked. How? Well put it this way, if I lock 100 people in one room and light a fire, the fire won’t burn a select few. Everyone is getting scorched. The same applies to sharing resources with others online. Even if you apply all the best security practices to your own site, if someone else hosted on the same server as you gets hacked, you’ll get hacked too.
Cannot handle high traffic: again, because you’re sharing CPU and memory with a bunch of other sites on the same server, there will be a low limit to how many visitors can access your site. Imagine offering a special promotion and users cannot access your site due to high demand. That’s money you’ve left on the table because you decided to limit how much you could earn by choosing a cheaper hosting option.
Key take-away
Dedicated vs shared hosting is like deciding if your website is going to live in a dormitory or an apartment. Think carefully about the decision and make a choice you won’t regret.
Another crucial consideration when deciding on hosting for your website is what security and disaster recovery measures are in place. Here’s is a run-down of essentials your web hosting provider should have to keep you secure:
SSL: Your site should be accessible via HTTPS by default. This is not a luxury, it’s a requirement. The impact of not doing this is your website get’s ignored by search engines leaving you wondering why it never shows up in search results. It also makes it easier for people to compromise the website and stealing any sensitive information you may have on the site or worse, defacing the site by replacing your content with explicit stuff.
Data encryption: particularly helpful if your website collects sensitive information from end users e.g. passwords, contact info, payment info and so on. Encrypting the data collected not only protects your customer data but shields your business from critical data breaches that allow hackers to expose this data to the world in plain text.
Automated backups: we want to believe things will never go wrong…but sometimes they do. There’s various reasons why your website could go down or get corrupted. At that point, you’ll want to be able to restore a backup of the site. If you don’t have one, there goes all your hard work. Sorry, start again. Assuming that’s a situation you don’t want to be in, better make sure your hosting provider keeps backups of your data.
Firewall protection: an unfortunate side-effect of AI tools is it’s getting easier and easier for people to creat bots that can steal data from websites or even worse, hack them. Having a web application firewall to protect your site against these threats is therefore something that’s moved from being a nice-to-have to a need-to-have. Without one, your site is that much more exposed to comment spam, hackers trying to take it down or deface it, as well as fake traffic from bots that aim to strain the website until it goes down (Denial of Service attacks).
Imagine seeing an advert for a product or service that excites you, only to visit the site and find it takes forever to load. This actually affects how people perceive your brand. A site that just works and runs smoothly gains a user’s trust and one that does not has the opposite effect. Loading speed of your site is not only about how the site was built but also about where the site is hosted.
There are other considerations for a web hosting provider to keep in mind in order to ensure your website’s data is secure, easily recoverable and loads fast for users. Some of the other factors not discussed include, content delivery networks (CDNs), reverse-proxies and load-balancing. However, these are more advanced topics and as a business owner that needs to make an informed decision on what kind of hosting to invest in to ensure you present a strong online brand to the public, what’s covered above should give you a fairly decent baseline to make your decision with.
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