It is after all the bit that makes all of the internet work but it is often overlooked on projects and this can cause major problems later on. I’ll try to explain why the right hosting is so vitally importantly and then discuss why the price differs so much between different providers.

The importance of the right hosting

There are many, many things which are important to your visitors when they visit your website; design, ease of use, the content, security etc. However there is one factor which will almost never show up on customer surveys – reliability and speed. A website server is just another computer, very similar to the one your reading this on right now – they don’t have the fancy stuff like speakers or even screens and tend to be much more powerful than your average laptop but they are just computers. Computers can only do so much at the same time. When they get too busy, you have to wait until they finish what they are doing so they can then get the page you want. Every time you request a page on a website, there is a server somewhere working its arse off to provide that page as quickly as possible. If there are two of you looking for one page at the same time then the server has to two twice the work so it will take it longer. If you have 1000 people looking at the page then it might starts to sweat and slow down a bit. 10,000 and it is in trouble. Things start breaking and it has to start rejecting requests for pages so your visitors get a blank screen or an error message. There is little point in having the world’s most amazing site if only one person can look at it at a time.

“Your hosting is too expensive... I found hosting for £1.99 a month”

Go on then. We’ll happily watch as you try to get your website up and running on the world’s worst hosting with no support, no reliability, no storage space and no server power. We won’t even say “I told you so” when you come crawling back for help. How these hosting companies are so cheap is that they pack as many websites as possible onto one server. So there are probably thousands of websites using the same computer as you – therefore you only get 0.1% of a server. This might be fine for your daughter’s 6^th form assignment but just won’t cut it if you are serious about your website.

Once you get to a certain size, just having powerful servers isn’t enough. You need a dedicated team to look after them; to tenderly stroke them when they get hot and flustered; to defend them against attack. Most of the time they aren’t needed but the one day they are is the day you realise why you pay that bit more. One of our clients had this exact situation only last week; their server came under attack. Within minutes of the attack starting, our dedicated hosting team had spotted the attack and started filtering out the attackers and stopping the attack for succeeding. Yet due to our standards, the client didn’t even know they had come under attack until we told them – there had only been a slightly slow down of services when the attack started and that was all. Without the skilled team there monitoring what is happening, the server set could easily have been completely crippled by this attack and the website in question go offline for hours or even days.

There are many, many types of hosting and for larger sites; they often need a bespoke solution whether it be load-balanced servers working together, cloud hosting or a network of servers around the world providing an automatic failover system. Each site will be different, have different needs and resource requirements so it is impossible to give a estimated cost. A good hosting package is one which provides your daily needs and copes with the exceptional events as well. One thing is for sure, any hosting package which does that will not cost £1.99 a month.