There’s more to hosting your website than you might think…
Marketing today demands a web presence and, in my opinion, that presence needs to include a website.
If you are creating a website you need to consider your hosting. Effective hosting is a key element of your business website. With this in mind, I thought it was worth putting together a quick guide to choosing the right hosting for your website:
The 4 Tiers of Hosting
Not all hosting offerings are alike. In most cases, “You get what you pay for“. In broad terms, I would say there are 4 main tiers of hosting service and which is the most effective hosting for you will depend on where you are up to with your business.
Tier 1 – Free hosting with your domain name
Hosting provided on this basis will be very basic and I would suggest that you should be very careful before taking this option.
If cost is a real constraint, I would recommend going down the hosted service route and build your site using one of the online site builders. Whilst use of these is a whole different post, a couple of the leading ones are:
- Wix.com
- WordPress.com
These options are somewhat limited in terms of functionality, however, they are inexpensive and take care of all the hosting issues. They can be a great option – particularly if you are doing everything yourself.
Tier 2 – Basic shared hosting
This is the base level if your website is key to your business and you want to have a level of control over functionality. In my view, unless you are just starting out and need to keep expenditure to an absolute minimum, this should be the base level for your business website.
Find a good host and their services can be great value for money.
The downside of basic shared hosting can be security and performance. On a basic shared hosting platform, your site may well be sharing a server with thousands of other websites. Performance for your site can be impacted by others on the server. For most basic sites, this should not be a problem, however as you site gets more complex (for example incorporating e-commerce or is getting more traffic), it becomes even more important to your overall business. As this happens, it is ever more important to ensure effective site performance.
The BSA Option
BSA Marketing offers public shared hosting on the 20i platform. We offer full telephone support, as well as WordPress updates & regular site backups as part of our package. We take the uncertainty out of making sure your site stays secure and running.
BSA Cost – from £18+VAT per month
Tier 3 – Hosting on a VPS Private Shared Server
The next level up is to put your site on a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Whilst this is still a shared platform, all the sites will be managed by your web company giving them total control over their impact on the performance of the server. Because of this the performance levels and security for sites hosted on a VPS platform are significantly better than basic shared hosting.
The BSA Option
BSA runs numerous VPS servers for the use of our clients. These are hosted on a totally redundant cloud system delivering high levels of performance and reliability. Being a shared platform, other sites on the server can still impact the speed and security of your site. However because all of the sites are closely monitored and managed by us the risks of this are minimised. Furthermore, we have a maximum of 30 separate sites on any one server – compared to potentially 1000s of sites on a basic shared hosting platform.
One other issue with running a VPS is that as a stand-alone system, you are responsible for the technicalities of running the server. However, for our clients, we handle all of this. We deliver the benefits of a VPS without the associated technical headaches.
BSA Cost – from £45+VAT per month
Tier 4 – Hosting on your own Private Server
The top tier of hosting is to put your site on its own server. This gives you 100% control over the environment. Also, because the server is hosting your site(s) exclusively, the performance of your website is never impacted by others.
If your website is mission-critical, and you want total confidence in its performance and security, then this is the way to go.
The BSA Option
BSA offers private servers, again hosted on a totally redundant cloud system delivering high levels of performance and reliability. However, with only your site on the server you have 100% control over the environment. As such we can set this up exactly to your specification. Because our systems are cloud-based, they are highly scalable, so should your requirements grow, your server can expand to fit, without the need to move to a new server.
Furthermore, on our private server we include advanced features as standard including:
- Hourly snapshot backups – if there is an issue, we can always recover your site to a state no more than 60 minutes ago
- Proactive resource monitoring – We constantly monitor server resources so if there are issues, these should be picked up and addressed before they impact the performance of your site
- Hardware firewall – All access to the server other than public access to your website, is locked down to minimise the risk of security breaches, further optimising the performance & stability of your site
BSA Cost – from £160+VAT per month
All of our hosting options are backed up by our legendary can-do attitude and real-world, business-focused support.
Effective Hosting The BSA Way
As with everything we do, our objective in delivering effective hosting solutions is to offer a first-class technical solution in the context of your wider marketing and business needs.
Our aim is that your hosting should be invisible. ASs far as you are concerned, it just works. You should never have to think about your hosting, safe in the knowledge in that we are.
We leave you to focus on your business.
Furthermore, we aim to ensure that wherever possible, technicalities should never get in the way of your marketing objectives.
Contact us to find out more
