Your website is a lot more than just its design, style and content. For designers and other web professionals, the physical or virtual location where a website is hosted can make a world of difference in terms of function, reliability and performance. A great number of webmasters tend to choose shared hosting for business websites without pausing to consider whether the hosting plan is adequate.
Most web professionals look for efficiency, dependability, performance, and security when shopping around for web hosting providers. Several shared hosting plans consistently offer those features at low prices, and thus many webmaster opt for a shared option only to later realize that they should have chosen a virtual private server or dedicated hosting from the beginning.
Not all websites are designed in the same fashion, and not all of them will fit well within a shared hosting plan. Quite a few webmasters mistakenly estimate that a specific website will always enjoy a certain range of visitors and traffic. For web professionals who create and maintain websites for clients, nothing is more embarrassing than a website going offline or not being available due to a sudden spike in traffic exceeding the bandwidth capacity of a shared hosting plan. This is particularly the case for business websites. A website owner could be conducting an aggressive offline marketing campaign, and before the webmaster realizes, a flood of new traffic suddenly materializes and ends up pushing the limits of the server.
Before choosing to host your websites in a shared server, ask yourself the following questions:
– Do you only expect a few visitors a day or is it possible that hundreds of visitors could one day arrive to check out new exciting content that was heavily shared in online social media platforms?
– Do you, or your client, plan to include a fair amount of media on the website? Will it be high-definition video or high-quality audio?
– Will you be integrating an e-commerce platform to sell goods or services?
– How likely is it that your website will end up near the top of a Google search results page?
If you had to stop and think about any of the above before coming up with an answer, you may need to host your website on a virtual private server (VPS) hosting plan. If a business website expects to process sensitive information, such as credit card information, thousands of times a day, then the website might be better off hosted on a dedicated server.
What other questions should web professionals ask themselves prior to deciding on the right web hosting plan?
Brian Flores is an online marketing specialist at InMotion Hosting, one of the top virtual private server providers in North America. He works with an awesome team of writers to create useful tutorials on web hosting support. You can read those tutorials by visiting InMotion Hosting’s Support Center.
Tweet