How much do you know about your web hosting service? Web hosting is an essential element of all online marketing yet many people simply take their hosting for granted. If the site can be seen that’s good enough. Not all web hosting is the same! It is undeniable that a site that loads quickly will be seen by more people. How many times have you clicked away from a website because it is taking too long to load? Let’s compare 2 types of hosting (both offered by BSA)
- Hosting on Shared Servers
- Hosing on a Virtual Private Server
The vast majority of websites (probably including yours) are hosted on Shared Servers. The chart below highlights one key difference between these two hosting scenarios.
There is a 3rd option hosting on a dedicated server (also offered by BSA), but this tends to be overkill for most SME businesses (and unnecessarily expensive!)
Hosting on Shared Servers
Sites are hosted on a server shared by many other websites (over 1000 is not uncommon). This offers an inexpensive and (assuming you choose a good host) reliable hosting environment. However there can also be risks as you have no control over the other sites on the server. This can lead to unacceptable levels of down time for your website, but more commonly leads to the reduction in website page load performance – as shown in the chart above. A second potential issue is that inappropriate behaviour and/or content on other sites hosted on your server can lead to that server being blacklisted. Although this is rarely a problem for the UK, we have had issues where target audiences for the site are overseas (eg China and some Middle Eastern countries).
Hosting on a Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Virtual Private Servers are still shared but BSA Marketing has 100% control over the sites hosted. We guarantee a maximum of 10 sites on any server so you can be sure that server performance for your site will not be overloaded. As all sites on our VPS servers belong to BSA clients, we also have access to the content of these sites which removes the issue of blacklisting. This is praticularly beneficial if you wish your site to have international reach. The flip side of this is that VPS hosting is more expensive (but still only around 15% of the cost of a dedicated server with virtually all of the benefits) Where used appropriately the additional costs are easy to justify on the basis of improved reliability and speed. If you want to look at whether VPS hosting can deliver real benefit to your business, give us a call
