Web Agency Dilemmas — Web Hosting

Working for a web design / digital marketing agency has it’s rewards. No one customer or website is the same, which gives myself and the team I work with, a breath of fresh air. One of the key parts of my job that I love the most, is meeting a customer for the first time and finding out what makes them tick and the end goals that they want to achieve.

We spend time with the customer, working out exactly what it is they want and in the timeframe/budget that they set. However there is one key area which I think potential customers do not fully understand or grasp. The importance of hosting their website/e-commerce store/application on a high quality web hosting platform.

I can get hosting for £1 per month though…

Time and time again, customers say to us:

“Why do I need to spend so much on web hosting? I have seen adverts on the TV / Magazines selling me hosting packages for £1 per month..”

Every time I hear this, I just want to slap myself on the forehead and cry in the corner.

The race car analogy

When a customer requests that we host their solution on a budget £1 per month (or similar) web host. We like to explain to them the pitfalls and downsides to it. Do you think the likes of Amazon, Twitter, Facebook all host their website on £1 per month web hosting.. no, of course not!

Ok so your new website may not be as huge as those listed above, but it doesn't mean that the same rules don’t apply.

Think of your new website as a hand crafted race car, it has had hours spent on it’s requirements gathering, you have had countless UI and UX meetings, countless designs and mocks ups drawn up to provide you exactly what you want. You have finally signed it off and ask the mechanics or engineers to work on bringing that design to life. You feel ecstatic that your dream is finally coming true. Time goes by and after several tweaks / amendments, your website/e-commerce store is ready to go live. At this stage the conversations return to hosting. Where do you want the end solution stored? “Well I have signed up for the £1 hosting package online”..

Thats like running your new hand built sports car on budget £50 partly worn tires.. You just wouldn’t do it!

Why good web hosting is important for success.

There are important factors when you host your website. If you are serious about your new website being successful, you want it to be hosted on it’s own managed server instead of a shared hosting server. Some of the pro’s and con’s of the options

Shared Hosting Pro’s:

Very low, cheap entry costs (£1 per month).
No technical knowledge required to manage or maintain the server. This is all done by the shared hosting provider.

Shared Hosting Con’s:

You are sharing a resource (a server) with hundreds or maybe thousands of other websites. What this means is that you are sharing a pool of resources (IP address, bandwidth, CPU, memory and storage). How does this affect you? Well read on..

Security/Availability — If just one of the other websites that is sharing the same server as you becomes victim to an attack, such as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, this would stop the server from being able to serve your website. This would bring your site down until the shared hosting supplier had time to find the source of the problem and correct it
E-mail delivery issues — If another website on the same shared server starts to send SPAM emails to people, then the server that your website resides on will start to be blacklisted. This will potentially result in any emails you send being directed into customers Spam/Junk folders.
Performance — Your seeing a pattern here right? If you are sharing server resources with thousands of other websites, what happens during the peak times? Your website (as well as the others) all receive increases in traffic. This additional load can cause the server to struggle (bandwidth, memory and CPU usage). When I say struggle, I mean load times will increase and the end users experience will suffer. Not only that, but now websites load times are also an important factor by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. If your website starts to take a longer than normal time to respond, this will reflect on your rating from the search engines. In turn this will hamper your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategies and all the work you have put in to make sure it ranks high.
Limited capabilities — If your website or application requires a certain piece of software or an additional module to work properly, it is more than likely that a shared hosting account will not have these bespoke modules installed. Most of the time, you will be required to contact the hosting provider and ask for them to install the additional packages or modules. This can receive a mixed response as additional software could slow the server down (slowing everybody else down) or the change could be large and the host reject it.

Managed Hosting Pro’s:

24/7 Support for your server if required.
Server resources that are solely for your usage. Performance will be significantly higher than that of a shared hosting provider. As an example, we recently uploaded a website onto both a large shared hosting provider and a dedicated managed server. The load times for the shared hosting would fluctuate between 3.2 and 9 seconds (depending on the time of the day). The load time for the dedicated hosting was approximately 1.2 seconds. A better experience for end users and a higher score for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
If the time arises where you need to give your server more resources, a simple request can be made to the dedicated server (managed) host to scale the server. This means they can briefly pause your server and increase the memory, CPU, bandwidth (if required). This would usually incur additional cost, but if your site is receiving this much traffic or popularity, you are doing something right!
Ability to install custom modules/software to cater for your solution.
Scheduled malware and anti-virus scans are usually provided by hosts to ensure that your server is free of any software or virus which could hamper your website.

Managed Hosting Con’s:

There may be limitations imposed by your hosting company on certain actions that can be performed. This is usually a security precaution to stop end users from being able to destroy or misconfigure their server. If you have an in house IT team who are proficient with managing servers than there is the route of running your own in house server or by managing your own VPS servers (for example: Digital Ocean).
The prices for Managed hosting are higher than those of shared hosting. Depending on your requirements, you could spend anything from £30 per month to £1000 per month.

Wrap up

If you are serious about your website or e-commerce solution, you need to invest the extra money into the heart of what makes your site function.

There are more hosting options available (Cloud hosting, VPS, In house hosting). I just wanted to touch on these two to put across my point.