web hosting

Everything You Need to Know About Web Hosting Before Choosing A Web Hosting Provider

Posted on by Mario

Having a business is not only about having a store and selling some stuff. There are more than just meets the eye. In order for your business to succeed, you have to grow your business both offline and online. When it comes to growing a business online, you need to have a website as well. And when you have a website, you have to consider hiring not only web designer and web developer, but also web hosting services. Why? Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live. Think of it as the home of your website where it actually lives. Now that you understand the importance of web hosting, now you should understand some facts about web hosting before you decide to choose a web hosting provider. Keep reading this article to find out!

There are different types of web hosting

If you’ve spent any amount of time on a web host’s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways. Dedicated servers offer close to metal implementation with little overhead, and they’ve been traditionally the go-to-solution for high performance demanding tasks. On the other hand, VPS allows clients to get a share of a physical server for a number of hardware resources they’ve paid for, and multiple clients often share one physical host machine. Cloud servers are often confused with the VPS, as both are based on virtualization and come with many of the same advantages. Much of the definition, however, depends on the particular host provider.

They say “Unlimited” but it’s not quite unlimited

Web hosts will encourage you to sign up for their web hosting plans by convincing you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It’s generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I am not saying that that these web hosts are straight up lying, but the “unlimited” storage or data transfers boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company. So, it is what it is.

Your website can be vulnerable to cyber attacks

Hacks, malwares, and virus are common cyber attacks that can damage your business website. Sadly, many people who are just starting out with their own website may not be aware of all the associated quirks that come with maintaining a successful online presence. But once you get into the details of it all, you’ll realize that understanding the essence of secure web hosting will be hugely beneficial to your website.

As you might suspect, there are plenty of other factors to consider regarding web hosting security, and the security policies of your website in general. However, we’ve tried to outline the most important ones here, so that you have a general idea of where you should start while shoring up your online safety. For that reason, you should be careful with choosing the right web hosting provider for your business website.

Security Threatened: Signs You Are Hiring A Bad Web Hosting Provider

Posted on by Mario

When it comes to building a business, almost many business owners nowadays know the importance of having a website for their business. However, not many know that having a website means having to protect it from unwanted attacks, such as virus, hacks and even malwares. Yes, having a website comes with many risks that can be bad for a business. For that reason, some business owners who are doing their homework on website knowledge hire web hosting services to protect their website. If you are one of them, good for you, but are you one of the business owners who hire a bad web hosting provider? If yes, please get out of there and rescue your business. If you are unsure, this article will tell you how to spot the signs. Keep reading to find out!

Too much downtime

One of the most important aspects of running a website is that you make sure the website has a good uptime. The uptime for your site can directly affect sales and conversions. If your website is down frequently, it should reflect in your traffic statistics as well as in your conversions. Nobody wants a website that is down more than 10% of the time. Every second that your website is down you are losing money. Most web hosting companies offer you a promise that the website will be up for a certain uptime percentage. However, you need to make sure they are telling the truth and proving their quality by looking at the reviews.

Poor customer services

One of the reasons why having a website is the best value for your business is that your website will be your 24-hour marketing strategy and 24-hour customer services. However, that also comes with a web hosting that is available for 24 hours a day. Whether you just have a question about the billing cycle or you are experiencing adware, viruses or other malfunctions on your site, the customer service department should be able to guide you in getting your website back up and running or answer any questions about billing to your account. If you cannot get in touch with the customer service department of your web hosting provider, then you’ve got a problem there.

Slow loading times

The first thing you have to have in your website in order to get the best first impression of your business is that you make sure your website visitors are not going to wait for your website to load the content they need to see. The amount of time that it takes for your website to load can be a strong factor to determine whether or not customers convert into sales. There is nothing more annoying than waiting for a website to load when with the simple click of a back button you can have other websites within a couple of seconds. Chances are if it’s taking your site too long to load, there is not enough bandwidth across the host server. Cheaper web hosting companies will sell shared hosting packages to multiple websites and bog down the processors and amount of bandwidth across the server making the websites slow. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you need to change your web hosting provider.

That’s the most important parts in noticing whether or not you are hiring a bad web hosting provider. If you have got similar problems like the ones I have mentioned above, then I suggest that you change your web hosting provider. I know it is not as easy as it sounds, but when you look at it deeper, you will find what you are looking for. Don’t forget to check the reviews as well.

Communal Living: 4 Reasons Businesses Should Stay Away from Shared Hosting

Posted on by Mario

web hosting tips

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the cheapest option is rarely, if ever, the best option. I would even go as far as saying that the cheapest option is unlikely to even pass the threshold of being merely good. For example, carbonated beverages and junk foods are typically one of the more economical options when it comes to a full meal and while I don’t deny that they can be fulfilling when you’re in a pinch, they’re not exactly what I would call nutritious. I do indulge in junk food from time to time, usually when I’m strapped for cash, but I make it a point to avoid them whenever possible.

You can apply this axiom to life in general and nine times out of then, it’s still going to hold up. I’m not exactly saying that the money you’re spending is always proportional to what you’re going to get but there’s definitely a correlation there and this can also be seen in the world of web development. When trying to determine which web hosting services you should pick for your business’ website, the term shared hosting is definitely going to pop up often. As the most economical option available for web hosting, you’re going to have to properly take shared hosting under consideration but as I’ve pointed out, there are also plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t.

Digital co-living with shared hosting

Those inside the industry tend to think of shared hosting as living in an apartment but that’s too generous of an assessment as in an apartment building, you at least have some personal space reserved for your use only, however limited. No, the more accurate description of shared hosting would be like living in a 4-bed room commonly seen in backpacker hostels. Sure, technically, your bed is your own but pretty much everything else is fair game so if one of your roommates decided to take up the annoying art of manspreading (apologies to men beforehand) and snoring within the vicinity then I’m sorry to say but you’re just going to have to deal with it.

In shared hosting, multiple websites are hosted in a single server and the resource of that server is divided among the websites hosted on that server. The server’s bandwidth, space, computing resource, the maintenance costs, etc are all shared among the tenants. Unlike in VPS (virtual private server) hosting however, where the server is at least digitally partitioned to ensure that each website is isolated from the others, there are no such divisions in a shared hosting plan. This lack of technological complexity is what makes shared hosting cheap but would also lead to several complications you might want to be aware of before committing to a shared hosting plan.

Lack of customization

The very first thing that’s going to come to mind with shared hosting plan is that you have very limited control over the actual server your website is hosted on. In a VPS hosting plan, even if you’re technically sharing server space with other websites/customers, you have complete free rein over the space you’ve been allocated. You’re free to choose your own operating system among other customization options for example, which can be quite useful if you consider yourself to be the more technological-minded. In a shared hosting plan, you’re merely allowed to use the resource provided by the server in lieu of the server itself and that can be quite limiting.

Lack of security

The biggest and most primary concern of course is the lack of security. If your apartment building is the site of a break in, chances are only one of the tenants has to suffer from the fallout but if a 4-bed dorm room gets broken into, every tenant staying in that room suffers equally. In a shared hosting plan, if just one website gets infected by a malware or is the victim of a data breach, there’s a high probability that every website hosted on that server is going to have to suffer from the consequences. In essence, a chain is quite literally only as strong as its weakest link.

It would invariably be inconvenient if you’ve worked hard to make sure your website is as secure as possible only for your lousy neighbor to ruin it with their lack of an SSL certificate. Also keep in mind that since the physical server is still mostly controlled and maintained by the web host, you’re going to be extremely reliant on them to keep your website safe and that’s not a good thing as businesses have to be as self-sufficient as possible. Given how ubiquitous ransomware, malware and data breaches are these days, shared hosting plan’s lack of security is pretty much a dealbreaker.

Lack of compartmentalization

Other than ransomware, malware and data breaches, one other threat modern websites have to watch out for is a denial of service (DoS) attack. Essentially, a DoS attack is a situation in which a website is excessively flooded with superfluous requests in order to overload the system and prevent genuine user requests from being fulfilled. DoS attacks can be quite simple to execute and is capable of taking even the biggest of websites with even Wikipedia playing the victim once. In a shared hosting plan, since you’re sharing a common space with other websites, a DoS attack to even one website would be capable of bringing the entire service down.

Lack of customer support

I’ve been on the other side so trust me when I say that while you’re guaranteed some measure of customer support for your website, you’re just going to be treated as another number compared to if you’re on a VPS or dedicated hosting plan. Because the number of customers on a shared hosting plan is considerably higher than other plans, it’s quite likely that you’re going to have to open a support ticket first and be greeted with generic questions and responses even if your problem is actually pretty unique. Depending on your luck, you might have to wait for several days before getting a respond which can get pretty annoying if your website was rendered suddenly and completely inaccessible.