I’m going to do a quick break down for you of the different types of website hosting that your business might be looking at.
So this gets a little bit nerdy, but I think it’s still valuable for most business owners to understand the way that hosting works. So I want to go through and explain how hosting can be a big benefit to you or a royal pain in your butt and how it can impact your business and just kind of the differences in hosting.
So platform hosted is basically things like Wix, Weebly, Duda, Squarespace. Those are businesses where they make their money selling you templates and then you pay a fee every month to use your website. Right. That’s how those work. There are several issues and several positives. The positives are they are cheap to spin those sites up. They’re fairly inexpensive to do design and development and they’re cheap to run monthly. Downsides for those sites come significantly when you start trying to do SEO or actual digital marketing efforts where your website is not an online business card, those platforms will kill you. And one of the reasons that they’ll hurt you so bad is because of website speed and agility. You can’t adjust that with those platforms. So they control how fast your
website loads and when it loads. Right, it is controlled by them.
So it is the, I always tell people your website is the one piece of digital real estate that you can own. You don’t own Facebook,
LinkedIn, Pinterest. You don’t own any of those platforms. You don’t own YouTube, you don’t own any of those things. They could wipe you out tomorrow and wipe your business out, but they can’t take your website down if you own it. But if you don’t own it and Squarespace does, you have to live by their rules. So that’s that is a platform hosted solution. You don’t have to worry about hosting because they do it for you.
In the world of WordPress and other types of business, you know, platforms like that Craft CMS or there’s several different other types of platforms you can use to build a site on and I’ll primarily focus here on WordPress, but you could have static sites and all of the things as well. But in the WordPress world, you’ve got shared hosting, vwhich is offered by a Bluehost, DreamHost, HostMonster, JustHost, there’s a gazillion…GoDaddy, you name it. They’ve got a hosting platform. Most of them either talk about shared or dedicated. Shared means that you live in a house with 15 other people. So if one of those people gets sick, all 15 of you are getting sick. If one of those people bakes a stinky burrito in the kitchen, it smells of the whole house. That is what happens with Shared. It’s cheap because there’s lots of people living under one roof. The problem is their mistakes
become your problem.
So you’re running an ad campaign, person X down the road gets hacked, your website crashes, nothing you can do. Right. You’re on a shared platform. They also tend to be more vulnerable to security threats and they’re usually slower. Dedicated hosting gets expensive, but if it’s true dedicated, it means you actually have to understand Ingenix or Apache or, you know, PHP, you have to understand MySQL, you have to understand a server in order to run those platforms.
It also can be expensive to have somebody manage that for you, because why do you need a custom setup? You most likely don’t unless you’re some crazy business that has these very specific needs. You probably don’t need dedicated so dedicated can cost anywhere from $30 to $100 or $500 a month to run a dedicated box or a server.
You most likely don’t need that where there’s a middle ground. Is like the way that we work, where we basically have wrappers for all of our sites, where they live in their own space, so you don’t you’re dedicated, but not really.
So you don’t have that an entire server dedicated to you. But what your neighbors do is kind of like a condo.
Your neighbors can make a stinky burrito and you won’t know because there’s a massive concrete wall between you and your neighbor. That’s basically what doing like a semi-dedicated solution is. So they’re cost effective, right? They can be very cost-effective.
You know, you typically expect to pay anywhere from $30 to $75 a month or a little more, depending on how much traffic you get in your bandwidth those kinds of things. But that’s a really good solution for most businesses, because it’s safer, it’s faster.
It allows you to expand as necessary and your neighbors don’t impact what you do, only you impact that. So you get hacked, it stinks for you.
Of course, you can get somebody like us to fix it, but you don’t harm anyone around you. And the same holds true. They can’t come in to harm you. So, yeah, platform-specific hosting.
You’ve got shared, you’ve got dedicated and you’ve got like semi-dedicated.
Our hosting also is WordPress specific. So we tend to try to not deal with websites that are not WordPress because we just don’t
want to deal with them. Right. To be completely honest, we’ve been able to accomplish everything we’ve ever wanted in the WordPress platform and it’s been amazing for our customers, so we’re like, it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
Our hosting is very specific to WordPress, allows it to be as fast and nimble as possible.
So if you need help with your hosting or you want to get off of one of those platforms, we have ways where we can convert people from Squarespace into WordPress. We can move your Duda or your Wix site into WordPress, something you own, and we can take care of it for you.
Find a solution like that for your business so that you can expand and do what you need to do. I hope this is helpful. Hope it wasn’t too nerdy. And I look forward to talking to you soon.
Thanks.
