Everything in the modern world develops in several mediums at a time and in a recent couple of decades, the medium that is becoming the most present is the world wide web, with websites being the primary forms for web presence.
Why is a website important
A website performs a whole lot of functions – promotion, presentation, communication, research, commerce, creative expression, and others. And in many cases, it has already become the only option used. With this in mind, a good website can be rightfully considered a foundation for any startup business nowadays.
The role of hosting
However, with the importance of a website, and how it is written, organized, and designed, an essential component of it can be often overlooked – namely web hosting.
While your website consists of a range of components, all of them run on some particular physical machine – on a server, a Virtual Private Server, or a dedicated server. This is the underlying hardware of the server and it’s responsible for everything that is going on with your website. In the following article, we want to have a look at some of the key reasons, why a robust hosting solution is a reliable foundation for any form of web presence of your business.
Why a reliable solution is the primary foundation for your web presence?
Having a powerful PC with a sufficient number of capacities is the primary condition for the applications to work well on it, which can be expressed numerically as:
The same is true in the case of a server and a website – or any other type of web project.
However, with hosting it’s not as straightforward as with desktop workflows, and there are pretty many other aspects that contribute to the quality of your server performance. This is connected with the fact that an online website is a result of a complex ensemble of conditions – it has that is to say more links in the chain. You don’t usually house a server directly, but rent it from a hosting provider, with different providers offering different options, conditions, and quality of service. And there are hence a lot more things to keep in mind. Now we want to discuss some of them.
Number of capacities and hosting type
The most visible thing when looking for a hosting solution is the number of capacities. The choice obviously depends on the scale of your project, so to meet the right decision, you have to carefully calculate it, considering the number of CPU cores, RAM, and storage you will need to seamlessly run your website, keeping in mind not only the heaviness of websites content and applications but also the expected amount of traffic on the website.
On the expected requirements of the website, the eventual hosting type will depend.
- A Virtual Private server
Usually, for startup projects, a Virtual Private Server – a VPS – will be the very optimal solution. A VPS is a hosting type that relies on dividing the capacities of a single physical machine across multiple clients with the help of virtualization technology.
This solution can start at a rather modest number of capacities for a low price and can go up to pretty impressive numbers, with the possibility to dynamically rescale as your capacity requirements change. Besides that, a VPS gives you robust levels of security and customization, working as if it were just a regular physical machine. With this in mind, a VPS can be considered a versatile solution for most startup businesses and generally for small- to medium-sized websites.
- Shared hosting
In case a user wants an even more economical solution, they can opt for shared hosting. It doesn’t offer dedicated resources and is nothing like a VPS in terms of security and reliability since the physical hardware space is shared without any special partition mechanism, but it’s also the cheapest option.
If the requirements of your project aren’t high, and occasional malfunctioning is not a big deal – for example, if you run a project for personal rather than business purposes – then you can have peace of mind when opting for shared hosting.
- A dedicated server
Dedicated hosting is just an entire server with all its resources dedicated to a single user. It offers the highest level of performance and unprecedented security, but it is the most expensive option with basic plans starting at already robust capacities.
This is a good choice if your project is by default large-scale and needs a lot of computing performance. Large e-commerce stores with hundreds of daily visitors are a common example of this.
Uptime: Ensuring Maximum Availability
The main condition of a website’s operations is its online presence, which is most often referred to as uptime. Uptime is comprised of a number of factors, such as:
- the quality of the underlying hardware;
- the data center infrastructure;
- the work of the provider’s team.
Maximum uptime is the primary condition of your website being always available for visitors. Instead, frequent downtimes will make more people reach out to your competitors for the simple fact of not finding your website where it’s supposed to be. Let alone the fact that downtimes can badly affect the SEO rankings of your website. This can especially affect start-up businesses that need to use all possible resources to become visible and promote themselves in the shortest time possible.
All in all, uptime is crucial and you have to make everything for your website to be always up nearly all the time, 99,9%. Thus, when looking for a provider, check, whether they can guarantee high availability uptime, by studying their website, reading reviews on them on the web, or contacting them directly.
Location: Optimizing Page Load Speed
Although purely technical performance is the primary requirement of your hosting solution, there is a more subtle aspect to keep in mind – the physical location of your dedicated server or VPS. The internet works according to physical laws, and therefore, the larger distance that separates a client from the host, the more the latency, and the more latency, the slower your website will load.
If you want to present your startup in the optimal form, you have to strive for the fastest page load speed, so your website leaves your visitors satisfied from the first glance. Otherwise, your customers may get disappointed and eager to find another website that loads faster. Search engines will consider this as well, so slow load speed will be a double hit for your startup.
To reach the lowest levels of latency, you should opt for a server that is maximally near your target audience, the nearer the better. So, when looking for a hosting provider, make sure they can offer a location in or near the place you’re going to target.
Support: Dealing with Technical Issues
Last but not least, technical support. When developing a startup, you’re doing your best to make everything it relies on work well. However, the hardware and the network infrastructure, with so many variables to consider, can from time to time unravel and there is no universal solution in this regard. Therefore, to ensure your website will always be up and working at its best, you have to be ready for any major force situation or technical issue.
In this regard, 24/7 technical support from the provider is an absolute necessity. Make sure the provider offers such a level of service and that they have real hosting experts on their team, and you can no longer worry about the performance of your web project.
Conclusion
A website is an essential form of presence for any modern startup business. Although it’s extremely important how well the website is built, as a website owner, you should not overlook another essential aspect of the website’s operation – the hosting solution.
The choice of one requires you to consider various aspects – choosing the right number of capacities, the hosting type, the uptime guarantee, the location, and making sure that your provider is capable of helping you solve any technical issues regardless of when they happen. When chosen carefully, your hosting solution will be the essential foundation for your startup and will be the first step towards its prosperity on the web. Thank you for reading!
