The Truth About Web Hosting

What does your web hosting company really do for you?

Web Hosting can be tricky to understand for newcomers and the fact of the matter is large companies tend to take advantage of this. We’re going to explore web hosting and how you can ensure that your host has actually got your best interests at heart.

What is web hosting?

Web hosting is what allows all sites on the internet to be published and accessible. Since few people understand this concept companies jump at the chance to take advantage of a client’s lack of knowledge. Web hosts buy or lease servers that are connected to the internet thus allowing companies like ourselves to launch your site on its virtual journey and allow other people to see it.

 Choosing a host

When choosing a host, a lot will essentially come down to your requirements and ideals such as budget and how much storage you require but there is plenty of other things you need to consider. When it comes to an area people are less clued up about we tend to follow the herd leading to many clients choosing a host-based simply on the amount of traffic they receive which isn’t the full story.

In actuality, the wise move is to study the reviews of a hosting company. One common misconception is that if your website is offline, your hosting company will get it back online. This is often false. For example, if your website was hacked and wasn’t displaying correctly, you may assume your website is offline, so would report this to your hosting company. Upon investigation it would turn out that there was nothing wrong with the hosting company’s systems, rather just your website has a problem with it. As the technical support team at the larger hosting companies are not ‘web developers’, they are restricted to telling you what is on the logs and expect you to fix it yourselves. The site then becomes a developer issue rather than a hosting issue since larger companies steer clear of including fixing a site in the web hosting agreement.

These scenarios are where using hosting provided by your web design company is often favourable as not only can they discuss technically about the hosting side of things but they are also able to organise their own team to remedy and fix any issues.

David and Goliath

We consider ourselves a happy medium when it comes to hosting since we are small enough to take a personal interest in your site whilst being large enough to offer you opportunities for growth and scale with your web hosting. However, the quality of support for the hosting companies that you might see advertised on television declines massively. These companies are dealing with an enormous amount of clients and simply do not have the time to offer attentive support.

In February alone, here at SO Marketing, we have been assisting clients who host with two of the largest players (who will remain nameless for this blog), who managed to break one client’s website and lose another altogether, both due to lack of website development experience in their team.

 A final word

We receive regular feedback from clients that have joined our servers from larger hosts and are surprised at the huge amount of support we can offer whilst maintaining the same level of service.

That said, it is always important to realise that hosting agreements only cover hosting issues for support no matter who you are with. Any remedial work that would need to be done on a website to bring it back to normality, would be chargeable in any scenario, it would just be significantly cheaper if your web development agency was the primary point of contact and can identify the issue faster and more efficiently.

We offer hosting packages starting from just £95+ VAT per year.  Get in touch to discuss having us as your host.