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The hosting environment and infrastructure for a website are often overlooked and misunderstood.
Some businesses will consider only cost when looking for a hosting provider, without understanding the implications that choice can have for their website.
Imagine building a brick and mortar store, and choosing the site based on cost without considering the location. Instead of building in a safe and secure area with good footfall and parking, you end up building in a high crime area with virtually no footfall and only residential parking. Your business is going to struggle to attract customers and will be at high risk from break-ins.
The same goes for where you choose to host your website. Whilst the cheap option might be tempting, it’s going to put your site at greater risk from security issues and hamper performance.
Quality-managed hosting, on the other hand, can provide your website with a well-optimised environment that keeps it secure, fast and working.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the benefits of managed hosting, and the even greater benefits you can reap from having your hosting, support and maintenance managed by the same provider.
Before we look at the benefits of managed hosting, let’s first look at the issues associated with self hosting options, and why we don’t recommend it to our support customers.
There are 2 self-hosting directions that businesses will go in. The first is a 3rd party self-hosting provider, and the second is having their own physical server managed by an internal IT team or Systems Administrator.
Most self hosting platforms can look attractive at first glance as they are often fairly inexpensive as self contained. This is because they’re usually big shared general purpose servers.
You need very little experience or knowledge to set your site up on one, as they’re already configured and there are few to no settings you can amend.
This can be great for a personal blog, or a little project website. For a real business, they’re not geared towards reliability, security or performance.
You can have a WordPress support and maintenance retainer with a support agency to look after and maintain your website. But if you don’t also host your site with them, they will likely be limited in how much they can do by the restraints your self-hosting provider places on them.
Some businesses choose to internally host their website on a physical server. This is often a decision led by IT teams or as a cost-saving exercise.
This often involves the need for physical backups and means that in the event of server failure, there is no means of a speedy recovery.
Unfortunately in most instances, Systems Admins or IT departments don’t understand how to set up a well-optimised WordPress environment. This leads to poor website performance and inadequate security.
Shared hosting is popular for its affordability, as the providers can offer low prices due to having hundreds or even thousands of websites hosted on a single server. These websites all share a server, a single directory, and IP address.
This creates a number of challenges for security and stability. No matter how secure and well maintained your website is, whilst on a shared server with no centrally managed maintenance and oversight, its security is dependent on every other site on that server being equally well maintained.
By sharing a server, directory and IP, all sites on a shared server are unavoidably linked. This means that if one site is poorly maintained and creates a vulnerability, then all other sites on that server share the risk posed by that weak point. If one site is hacked, all of the others are at risk of being hacked.
Shared servers are also far more likely to succumb to DDoS attacks, which will take the server down.
Sharing an IP address could also see your website or domain suffering from blacklisting by browsers, email service providers or firewalls. If one site on the shared server is blacklisted for spammy or suspicious activity, all the others may be impacted due to the shared IP.
Whilst there are some steps you can take to mitigate risk, they are limited.
This sharing of resources and lack of control over hosting setup can also greatly impact website performance. With website speed being more important than ever, being unable to optimise your website server side will leave you at a big disadvantage against competitors with websites with managed hosting.
Having the access, control and expertise to fine-tune and optimise the hosting environment specifically for your website can lead to significant performance improvements. This just is not something that can be achieved with self-hosting and generalist hosting providers.
If your website is built on WordPress and you don’t have much idea about server stuff, Managed WordPress Hosting platform can be a life saver.
Generalist hosting providers are notoriously difficult to get hold of, particularly when things go wrong. If something isn’t working you or your support partner won’t be able to speak to the host directly and have to wait to hear from them. Sometimes this can take days. If your site goes down, it’s out of your/your website partner’s hands.
As briefly alluded to above, some companies may decide to seek out a support and maintenance partner for their WordPress website, whilst staying with a 3rd party self-hosting provider or hosting internally to reduce costs a little.
Whilst this is certainly better than having no expert support in place, it will still present numerous issues and restrict how much a support partner is able to do for a website.
It may cost you a bit more but managed hosting is worth the investment if your business relies on your website to acquire new customers or to generate sales. Quality-managed WordPress hosting offers numerous benefits, both WordPress-specific and more broadly.
A good Managed Hosting provider will often also include:
Agencies offering managed hosting will often have access to normally expensive tools and benefits, which will be inclusive in your plan, saving a great deal of extra cost
Not all websites will require their own private server, and it would be complete overkill for a small website. So whilst general-purpose shared hosting is to be avoided, specialist-managed shared hosting on a WordPress-optimised server can offer the perfect compromise.
With the right hosting partner, the risks and issues posed by shared hosting will be mitigated because:
For larger and higher traffic websites, or those with more extensive security requirements (financial etc) a private server is often a better and safer choice.
Although more costly this brings with it:
When you next come to choose a hosting solution for your website think about everything discussed above. Are you looking at hosting that is equal to the importance of your website?
We hope this has provided you with a useful list of things to look out for when making your decision.
If you’re currently searching for hosting, or a Support & Maintenance plan for your WordPress website, why not add us to your list for consideration?
We’re the chosen WordPress Support, Maintenance & Managed Hosting partner for some of the UK’s largest businesses. Many with multiple WordPress & WooCommerce websites.
We handle everything technical and even liaise with third-party providers on your behalf. So you can tackle your day-to-day tasks, leaving the technical website stuff to us.
If you’d like to learn more about our WordPress & WooCommerce Support & Maintenance plans, drop us an email or give James a call.
Our plans provide a holistic solution to your website’s performance, reliability and security, and are inclusive of premium tools and services.
