When choosing a hosting to host our website, we often go for the most immediate and / or cheapest solution. This is because we are not aware of how important that choice is, we simply think that once the website is up everything is done. We type in the address and our website appears.
However, with a few exceptions, this kind of hosting will give us problems in the long run. “Cheap” hosting uses shared servers where resources are shared between dozens (or hundreds) of users. This brings a series of problems:
- Too many users on our machine: If our server is shared by another 100 websites and the resources are not properly sized, our page could take several seconds to load (I have seen cases of up to 30 seconds’ load time per page), or worse still, throw errors for exceeding the maximum number of simultaneous connections. This kind of thing makes our users leave our website because it is uncomfortable to browse, not to mention the penalties Google applies to slow websites with errors.
- Risk of catching a bad reputation: Since we are going to share an IP with many other websites, if any of them publishes inappropriate content (malware, illegal software, link farms…) or goes in for sending junk mail, it is more than likely that we will have problems since our IP will end up on some blacklist. So many servers will reject our emails or move them straight to the spam folder and our website’s ranking will be adversely affected.
- Poor user service: It is all a matter of doing the maths. If we pay €30 a year and that includes the domain, resources, traffic, configuration, etc., we cannot expect an IT professional to attend to us instantly and give us a quick solution to our problem when simply the time they lose reading our email and understanding it is worth more than we have paid in a year once costs are deducted. Instead we will have to be the ones who solve our problems through the management panel. But clearly not all of us know PHP, SQL or how to properly create an SPF record or a DKIM signature for our domain. And if a service unfortunately goes down, hours (or days) can pass before we convince whichever technician is on duty that the problem is not ours but theirs.
It is for all these reasons that we should take some time, first, to know what we need in terms of resources, not only in the short term but in the medium term, and second, to choose a reasonably serious company with a good reputation. A good way to find this out is to visit their social media profiles. The classic “cheap” company is riddled with complaints, insults and, of course, no reply at all from them, YOU SHOULD STAY WELL AWAY FROM THIS KIND OF HOSTING!
By this we do not mean that all shared hosting is bad. If it is properly sized and has a good technical team behind it, it is a more than acceptable option. We have the example of Dinahosting.
However, if our website is going to be more than a mere business card, it is worth going further and look for a solution that combines performance / customization and reliability. We basically have two alternatives:
- VPS: It is a virtual server with a series of guaranteed resources (processing power, RAM and disk space). This solution has the advantage that, since we have a minimum of resources that are ours alone, we can have more control over our website’s speed and we are more immune to load spikes from other users. It is also easy at any point to allocate more resources to our machine if it has become too small for us. The drawback is that we do not have full control over the server configuration and the operating system.
- Dedicated Server: It is usually the most expensive solution, but a dedicated server lets us do what we want and how we want. We can have the operating system we feel most comfortable with (Linux, Windows, …), we can have the latest versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL (or MariaDB) without waiting for our hosting company’s technicians to decide to update them. And if there is a problem we do not have to wait for a technician (with more or less of a clue/willingness) to fix it for us either. The drawback of a dedicated server is that we need a minimum of knowledge about administering servers, although there are providers that offer dedicated servers managed by them.
Location also matters of our hosting company, since if we hire the services of an American company we will have, right from the start, latency of almost half a second on every connection. It may not sound like much, but bear in mind that loading a page can involve anything from 20 to more than 100 connections to load each and every element it is made up of (images, style sheets, scripts, …) and many of those elements are called by others, so that latency adds up again and again on every request.
A slow website is an uncomfortable website to browse, you only have to think how annoyed we get when our smartphone takes several seconds to do what we asked it to. Besides, speed is one of the factors Google uses to rank websites.
Another important thing about where the hosting is located is that if we do not geolocate our website properly it could be that our page is appearing in searches carried out in the USA and hardly shows up in Spain. This is because Google gives ever more weight to location in order to show search results better suited to users. If our website is on a server in California, and we give Google no other clue, it will assume our website is aimed at Californians. This will cause a high bounce rate among the people who visit our site (since it is not aimed at them) and the resulting penalty in the search results.
For all these reasons, it is very important to make the right choice, above all while there is still time, and we should not see hosting as a necessity but as an ally who will work with us to get our project off the ground.