The importance of quality hosting
For websites to appear on the Internet they need to be hosted. What we mean by this is a computer specifically designed for web hosting has to project the files into the digital space. These hosting machines need to be online 24/7 365 days per year.
Being a web development company our main priorities are to cater for the digital online needs of our customers. Most of the work boils down to education. People want to know exactly what they are spending their hard earned cash on. We’ve had some funny conversations with people as we try to explain why they need hosting for the website to appear on the Internet, without going into detail to much (I don’t want to embarrass anyone we’ve worked with!) one particular person was under the impression once a website was created you simply ‘gave’ it over to the Internet, job done!
I want to avoid going into loads of technical details on types of hosting and all of that. I’d be here for weeks. What I’m trying to do is convey the message of getting hosting which compliments the website which needs it. Take our website for example. Its running a CMS and blog platform off a mysql database. This means we need hosting that’s capable of running a mysql database, practically every type of hosting can offer this. Then you need to look at bandwidth. Bandwidth essentially means how much information will the server have to push to peoples computer when they view the website. Sites with loads of hosted video content and high resolution images and large files for download will ultimately require more bandwidth to operate. Hosting packages often have bandwidth caps, if you go over them you’ll find yourself paying more, so its a good idea to make sure your covered in that respect to begin with.
Our website does not require that much in terms of hosting power to keep it running fast and smooth giving everyone who visits it a great user experience.
On the other hand you have websites which are far more resource hungry, take e-commerce sites for example. These sites will often contain lots of information in large databases. This all impacts on the hardware the hosting computer has. It may need a faster CPU, more RAM or even a bigger hard drive to store all the information it needs. It goes deeper than this though. If a website is a critical part of a business, its needed to be online at all times, downtime needs to be eradicated and it need to have multiple redundancies in place in case of any failures then prices will go up. For example its a great idea to host critical online service sites in cloud network infrastructures, which mean the website is basically hosted on multiple machines in case of failure.
There is lots to consider when it comes to hosting. Without the correct hosting in place websites can often struggle. Hosting is the foundation of any website and needs to be correctly implemented.
Want to know where these web servers are? They are in data centres just like this one below!
