What is Web Hosting?

The short version – Web hosting is a service provided by a hosting provider that allows businesses or individuals to publish their website and content on the internet. Many content management systems (like Wix & Squarespace) provide their own managed hosting services, while the likes of WordPress offers both hosted and self hosted options.

Today we are going to go over why it’s a better idea to host your website locally.

Benefits of hosting your website in Australia

Selecting the right web hosting provider is a decision that requires careful consideration and with so many choices available, it can be overwhelming. If you are starting out or looking to make the switch from your current provider, we are going to lay out the cold hard facts for you.

There are three basic principles that every business should follow when choosing their hosting plan and provider:

Reliability, convenience, cost-efficiency and speed.

If you’re an Australian business choosing an Australian based host will have a dramatic impact on your website’s performance. I’m not saying that because Velocity Host is an Australian company and you should host with us (BUY BUY BUY!) haha. This is not a sales pitch, we are here to educate and make our readers aware of some of the facts.

Jump over to our other article Six Reasons Why Local Australian Web Hosting With a Reputable Provider Will Deliver the Best Return on Investment for a low down on local hosting facts.

So let’s jump into some benefits of Australian WordPress Hosting compared to other platforms:

When looking at platforms like Wix, Squarespace and Shopify just to name a few they all have one thing in common – what’s that you ask ?

They are all selling ‘platform as a service’ – what is wrong with that you may ask?

Good question!

The problem with these providers is that your website data is captured on their platform meaning if you wish to move to a different platform you’ll need to rebuild your site in full on the new platform of choice. WordPress, it should be noted, is transportable between its fully hosted and ‘self hosted’ options.

Why would I want to move you may ask?

Another good question.

All of these platforms have 1 major thing in common that may not work for your business or website objective and will become a limiting factor for your business growth. The services and integration’s they offer have limited scope for extending the platforms core function, don’t take me the wrong way, they will be a good fit for many businesses but will fall short on the following.

Limited customisation to incorporate 3rd party services that are not on their integration list.

If SEO is important to your business model, as opposed to paid advertising, then the SEO features and tools on offer within these platforms is often limited, especially compared to something like WordPress.

Many if not all of the listed platforms are hosted off shore which can increase page load times and impact on SEO ranking, check out our previous article on why Australian web hosting is best for your business if your target audience is mostly local.

With Australian WordPress Hosting you can pick up your website with all crucial data intact as is and move it to another host of your choosing, for better performance and better support, its your data you should be able to move it wherever you like.

Depending on your hosting requirements these may exceed what is on offer on other platforms, do you need more storage? What about limited performance? Are you forced to upgrade to a much more expensive package just because you need a little more room to grow? Being able to move your website to a provider of your own choosing means you can always get better value for your hosting package without constantly being upsold.

If support is a big factor for your website then having a managed WordPress website could be exactly what your business needs.

What is the difference between self-managed and managed Web Hosting?

As the name suggests, self-managed hosting puts you in charge of managing your own infrastructure, software, support and maintenance. Next comes the question of whether to host on-premise or off-premise at a dedicated datacentre.

Self-managing a server can be a lot of work to keep up to date, it can also be expensive if you decide to host off-premise as a form of disaster recovery. Also, if something goes wrong, it is up to you or your team to fix the problem. This could take hours out of your day, putting you behind schedule and as a result potentially losing potential clients, money and time.

Hosting with the right provider will safeguard your data in a high-quality and off-premise datacentre. Saving you the upfront cost of investing in your own infrastructure, support and maintenance team.
There are a variety of hosting options to choose from such as Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Managed and Cloud. These can be powered by different types of underlying infrastructure to match different price points.

Managed WordPress hosting offers a variety of performance tweaks and added services, an extra cost on top of your base hosting plan.

You get what you pay for at the end of the day. That’s why there is such a drastic difference between cheap shared hosting at $4 per month, compared to a dedicated managed WordPress host that can range between $33 – $2,500 per month or more (to use an old analogy – how long is a piece of string) depending on what sort of solution your business needs and the amount traffic the site generates will determine the final cost of your solution.

The downside to some shared hosting providers – overloaded servers could mean slower load times and lots of potential downtime

What does this mean?

With traditional shared hosting when a large number of visitors try to view your website at once, it can cause the server to overload and potentially crash your site.

The majority of Shared hosting providers offering low cost plans do not offer guaranteed resources for your site to function, think of a bus completely loaded with people, now take out the seats so everyone can fight over space and air. – that’s low cost shared hosting.

Shared hosting was initially designed to keep costs low by dividing resources unequally and sharing them with multiple clients websites running on the same server. Shared servers can be used to host hundreds even thousands of sites at one time, with resources being delegated on-demand but not restricted so if there’s a busy website with loads of site visitors it will make your website perform like rubbish. – this is called the noisy neighbour syndrome.

Not to jump onto our own bandwagon but we do have solutions in place for our own shared hosting clients where all sites get a set amount of guaranteed resources that the site can consume, this puts the seats back into the bus.

More so with (vh) Australian shared hosting you can even get an entire row to yourself or more if needed, guaranteeing better performance for your website in the same way as if you had a VPS or dedicated server but without the management overhead and IT complexity that comes with a higher grade service, with (vh) Australian shared hosting being able to pay for more shared resources and guaranteed performance without compromise at the same time keep hosting costs lower to be in line with your business budget.

When the time comes, and your business website is busting at the seams talk to us about a VPS, dedicated server or cloud hosting solution that can scale with your business.

My business is small, is shared hosting okay?

Depending on the service provider shared hosting may exist on a single server if this server is offline due to maintenance, technical issue or hardware problem then your site is also offline.

(vh) Shared hosting is deployed with high availability in mind, if there is a physical hardware issue on single server your site and data is moved to a functioning server with a small pause in service while the fail over happens. – link to (vh) shared hosting on our website.

One thing to take away from this article, is to make sure to do your research and shop around for the right web hosting plan and provider.

If you would like to learn more about Velocity Host and our hosting solutions, contact us today to book your free consultation with one of our web hosting experts.