Everything Website Hosting

Gold Coast Web Design

With so many options on what type of hosting package to choose and of course what provider to trust your website with. It can all be so confusing and overwhelming. Below we discuss some of the important elements that you need to understand about website hosting and how to find the best provider and hosting package.

What is website hosting?
Once your website is built and ready to take live, the website files need to be stored somewhere, preferably safe and secure! But what should you look out for when finding a hosting provider?

Where are you being hosted?
If you are targeting Australia then you want to be in an Australian datacentre –the main ones are Sydney, Perth & Melbourne. The further away your website is from your target audience the longer it takes to load so you don’t want your website sitting in a datacentre in Europe if your target audience is in Australia

Website Speed.
Often when a website is slow people automatically assume it is the website. More often than not, one of the biggest factors in a slow website is the server a website is being hosted on. For example if you have a cheap hosting package then you are more than likely sitting on a shared hosting environment which means that the resources on that server are being shared across thousands of websites. Just like internet, if everyone is trying to use the internet at the same time, it slows down and more often than not struggles to load. If you want to take your website speed seriously, then we recommend looking at several other options than shared environments such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS’s), Dedicated Servers or the latest and greatest technology –Google Cloud! These environments come with a larger price tag than the shared environments. You also get additional factors that can be utilised to increase speed and these include CDN’s (Cloud deployment Networks), high frequency networks and cluster servers with load balancing. This is all very technical and we could go on forever about this, so if you would like to find out more –chat to our team.

Website Backups.
This is vital to every business. If you don’t have a backup of your website and something goes wrong, then you will have to start all over. No one wants downtime for their website and having to start over means a website rebuild which can take 2 weeks plus (website dependant). If you are running an online store, we recommend daily backups so that you don’t lose customer details and orders. For example if you run an online store and only backup on the 1st of every month, and the website crashes on the 20th of the month –you will lose 20 days worth of customers and orders when you recover the backup.

Website Security.
Website hacking is extremely rife. Hackers are trying to gain access to your website to steal your data or flood the website with spammy links. Security is very important. We incorporate security at a server level, cPanel account level and at website level. Security doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be hacked but it most certainly does help to slow the hackers down! No one can guarantee a hack because there are many ways to hack. Prime examples are: you load a free plugin onto your website but the plugin is compromised, often offshore build websites have back doors left in the website for hackers to easily access, or you connect to an insecure wifi and sign into your website. It is like having a house, if you leave the doors and windows open and go out, anyone can walk in.

QUICK GUIDE:

  • Hosted in Australia
  • Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting for Speed Performance
  • Website Backups
  • Website Security

If you have any other questions that you would like help with, please do not hesitate to contact our team. Or if you are ready to host with us, then click here to get started.

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