While it might seem like an obvious statement, keeping your website online is vital! Just consider for a moment the recent outage of the Facebook-powered services and apps had on the tech giant. With an estimated loss of around $65m during the outage, plus the knock-on effect on their share prices, being offline for even 6 hours was a costly experience for Facebook. Not to mention the impact it will have had on the thousands of small businesses who rely on their social media platforms to promote their products and services.
We all know that technical problems can occur, but we thought it would be a good idea to remind you of the importance of investing in quality hosting for your website. There are a lot of options out there and we want to break just some of them down a bit for you.
For smaller companies, or those who do not have the technical know-how, space or desire to invest in the infrastructure to host their website on premises, using a hosting company makes perfect sense.
Depending on the size of your business and the amount of traffic your website gets, one of the following three options are probably a good fit for you. As your business grows you may need to move from one to the next, and we are always on-hand to talk you through your options.
Managed Hosting
When you are just starting out, Managed Hosting is an excellent entry level solution. As your website and related services sit on a server that is shared with a number of other customers, the cost is comparatively low, making this the ideal starting point while your business is in the early stages of development.
A commonly presented downside to shared hosting is that, because your website is on the same server as other clients, the resources available to you are limited. While this can be the case, provided that the server uses a Load Balancing platform, your website’s performance should not suffer greatly.
Managed Hosting is also helpful when you are not familiar with managing a server yourself, as the hosting company will take responsibility of keeping the server up-to-date and your service online.
Virtual Private Servers
As your company and the corresponding web traffic grows, you may also outgrow a shared server. Milestones like this can be a bit daunting. Both the cost and the technical requirements for managing a server will increase, but to allow your business to develop, it is a step you will want to take.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are similar to a shared server solution as multiple customers still have their website hosted on the same server, but there are two major differences.
Firstly, the virtualisation used means that you effectively get your own “server”. This virtual separation from the other websites hosted on the physical machine gives you greater control over the software and security of your website.
The second differences is that each VPS has resources dedicated to them, so there is less likelihood of your website being slowed down by a larger “neighbour” as there is on a Shared Server.
These two things can make a huge difference to the performance of your website or service. However, the increased technical requirements of managing the software and security settings can cause problems, if you don’t have the technical know-how.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Arguably the top layer of Web Hosting services, a Dedicated Server is exactly that; a web server fully dedicated to a single client. This gives you full access to the bandwidth and resources that machine has. And because there is no-one to share with, you have full control over all of the configuration settings for it, and can make sure it meets your exact requirements.
Of course, the fact that you make sole use of the server does mean it costs more than either a Shared or Virtual Private Server solution, and the experience needed to manage the security and software is significant. However, if your hosting company offered a fully managed Dedicated Hosting experience – which we do – then this is one less thing you will have to worry about.
Final thoughts
We hope this brief explanation of the different types of web hosting has been helpful. No matter what option you go for, there will be some technical and cost considerations.
Also, as the Facebook outage shows, downtime can still happen, so it is important to find the right hosting provider. You need someone who can minimise the effect of any outage and ensure you are up-and-running again as quickly as possible.
Just so you know though, our superior network setup means we are happy to provide our customer with a guaranteed 99.9% network uptime.
Still not sure? Call us on 01889 280010 or email hello@zephi.co.uk. We are always excited to discuss hosting options.
