Every website is hosted somewhere, when you view a website, that website is being sent to your device from a web server somewhere in the world. But finding the right webserver for your business is not easy, there are just so many types and configurations to choose from.

Basic, Economy, Standard, Professional, Deluxe, Ultimate, Cloud, Virtual Private Server, Dedicated, Shared, Reseller, Linux, WordPress, Windows, Business, Personal, the list goes on. But which is right for you?

The answer may be different for each use case, but for a typical website setup;

Website Server Type

Hosts usually split their packages into different tiers, such as Basic, Standard and Professional for example. The vast majority of websites can sit in the Basic or Standard as usually the difference between these involves how many websites you can host and how much space you use on the server.

Many hosts also offer server types, including Standard (this means shared, i.e. a host will usually host thousands of websites on the same server – inexpensive), Dedicated (your own server – most expensive) or VPS (your own dedicated area on a shared server – mid ground).

Most websites sit on shared servers happily, but you may need to go VPS or Dedicated of your websites has specific needs or software requirements.

WordPress Hosting

A WordPress Hosting package is becoming commonplace, not surprising considering WordPress powers 43% of all websites (as at March 2022). WordPress hosting means that the server has been geared towards serving WordPress websites only. Sometimes you also gain extra features, such as being able to manage your WordPress website from your hosting account.

If you have a WordPress website, you may want to consider WordPress hosting, however sometimes WordPress hosting can be fairly barebones in server features, meaning if your website does something clever (such as our Bullhorn to WordPress Plugin) you may need to choose a more standard hosting environment.

Additional Server Features

A web server should have lots of features available to you, such as the ability to copy your site at the click of a button. This is useful if you want to make changes to the website that only you can see. Once you are happy with the changes, just one click will move this website live for everyone to see.

A server should also provide website optimisation tools. These tools can heavily speed up your website, helping the end user and also improving your search engine ranking.

Your web server should also be fully secure. The server should be able to automatically detect intrusion attempts and block them at the source. There should also be malware scanning tools in place to detect any malware as soon as possible.

Backups

The main reason for writing this post was because a website design and development customer of ours recently lost their website. The website host did not know why the website went down, but they did recover the website from a backup.

However, the latest backup file they had was from 8 months ago! All of the work and updates they performed on their website over the last 8 months were lost.

The host in question is one of the world’s largest hosts, boasting millions of customers. Their website talks about providing 7 days of backups as standard. In reality however, they only had one backup for this customer which was 8 months old.

This is not uncommon, making a backup and actually being able to restore from a backup are two very different things as this customer found out.

Our hosting services

The above all leads me nicely in to some self promotion, our own hosting services. Let me start by stating that our hosting is powered by 100% renewable energy.

Customers that host with us are placed on to the most appropriate hosting package for them. Our servers are very feature rich, allowing you to create a backup with one click, copy the site with one click, scan for malware with one click (although you don’t need to do that as our servers constantly scan for you), use our optimisation tools and super importantly should anything go wrong, restore your website from a backup again with just a few clicks.

Our servers are regularly penetration tested (security professionals try to hack in to our servers) to ensure they remain secure.

We also host our own websites on our web servers of course. I always feel comforted when a restaurant worker eats the restaurant food after their shift, we host our own websites as we know that there is no better alternatve.

If you want to talk to us about moving your hosting to us, contact us today.