What Is Web Hosting?
Website hosting is a crucial step to consider when putting your website online. But you may not know the security, speed, and vulnerability issues you give up by going with one hosting company over another.
When you are hosting your website, you place your website files on a large computer (a server) so that people can access your website from any location. As you can imagine, cheap hosting does not mean good hosting. Here are a few things to consider when considering where to host. You can also check out what our hosting is all about and look at our hosting packages.
Server Location
Where is your server located? I had a client hosting his website with a large name brand hosting company, and his server was in Europe. Two issues with that, Europe has privacy requirements that are different from the US – so your website could be none compliant based on where it is stored. Also, if someone local wants to visit your site, it will take much longer to visit your site – since the server is not local. Speed is a huge factor – and it’s a ranking factor for Google- so your website loading slowly can affect your rankings online.
We make sure the server your website is on is as close to your business location as we can get. No matter where you live, we can digitally move a server location closer to your site to speed up the file transfer process. Not many hosting companies will do that for their customers.
Security
Website Security is also another issue. One of the factors of website security is your hosting company. Protection will be significant for your liability if you collect customer data, charge credit cards, online e-commerce, or are in the health/law/financial field.
Many larger companies host hundreds or thousands of websites on a single IP address (shared hosting). This is like having the same address for hundreds or thousands of people – the only difference is that person’s name. This can pose some security risks.
One issue is that these companies often cannot update their servers or software enough – since updating requires that ALL the websites on the server must update their websites (since hosting companies cannot make changes to the websites themselves). So, for example, if, for security reasons, you had to update your computer to Windows 10 – but you had to wait until all your neighbors updated their computers to Windows 10. This can be a huge hassle.
In the digital world, the older a software is – the more vulnerable it can be.
Since all our hosting customers are businesses we have built, maintained, and worked with, we know every website on each server and keep those servers updated and secure.
Speed
Speed is another issue that can play a factor; much like computers – servers can have different processing power and storage/delivery speed. As you can imagine (much like your own internet), the more people using the same computer or internet cable- the slower it gets. Speed often decreases when hundreds and thousands of websites use the same network.
Speed is a ranking factor for Google, and we take it seriously. So our servers are optimized for speed and optimized to fit in with certain websites. To maximize speed, we keep computer processing high – by limiting the number of websites on each server and the type of website.
Depending on your website, clients, market, and objective – your hosting has to fit the overall goal of your website
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