The quick guide to Web Hosting
A crucial part of any web design and development project is making sure the right website hosting is in place to ensure your site runs quickly and securely.
I offer a range of hosting services, designed to suit all types of sites and covering all key functionality to give clients everything they need to get their site online.
In my quest to keep the web design process as jargon-free as possible, here is my quick guide to key terms typically used when looking at web hosting.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting refers to the computers, networks and software that power your website and makes it visible to the world. Web Servers are powerful computers with ultrafast internet connections that typically host multiple sites at once.
What do I get with a Web Hosting account?
Most web hosting accounts include the server space to store a copy of your website ready to serve to the world and all the software required to run your site. Startup accounts may also come with a domain name (your address on the web) and email accounts.
What’s a domain name?
Your domain (such as hellodesign.co.uk) is your unique address on the internet, which is connected to your hosting so that requests to view your website as well as send you email all end up in the correct place.
What is secure web hosting?
Otherwise known as SSL or HTTPS, secure hosting ensures that connections between your website and your visitors are kept secure and private. It’s now considered essential to run your website with a secure connection, and Google even gives priority to secure sites in search results.
Does hosting performance matter?
Web users can be impatient, especially when using slower connections such as on their smartphones – so your web server needs to be fast to ensure visitors see your information as quickly as possible. Again, Google pays attention to this and now factors server response and page-load time into search results, penalising those sites that it thinks take too long to load.
How do I get the best performance?
Most smaller sites will run just fine on simple hosting packages, however as with all things, the more you pay, the more you get. Higher level accounts are hosted on faster servers that typically serve less websites, ensuring your site runs as quickly as possible. Sites with lots of pages, applications or e-commerce functionality will typically require better hosting than simple marketing websites.
How much does it cost?
Costs vary depending on the level of performance and technologies required, the type of domain name you’d like (.co.uk, .com or something else?), your email requirements and how long you’d like to register the site for. Typically hosting is registered 12 or 24 months in advance, renewing annually or bi-annually as required.
It all sounds complicated, can you do it for me?
Absolutely, I’m happy to recommend the best solution for your needs. My costs include all setup fees to get the hosting and domain online quickly, as well as my support for the life of the hosting period should any problems arise with the site or your email.