If you’re planning on creating an online presence for your food business, reliable web hosting is essential.
There are endless varieties of web hosting services available and choosing a suitable plan will mean having access to a quality provider to keep your website loading quickly and reliably for your visitors.
If you’re new to operating a website, knowing where to start and what route to go down can feel extremely overwhelming.
In this blog, we provide you with everything you need to know about web hosting and explain how choosing the right provider can impact the success of your website.
What is web hosting?
To summarise, web hosting is the process of renting or buying space to house a website on the World Wide Web.
While we may think of websites as something that only exist digitally, in reality, physical resources are also needed to power Internet content, mainly in the form of servers.
A server is a powerful computer that holds all the files that comprise your website; it is the physical space where your website “lives”.
A good web hosting service provider makes sure their servers are operational as close to 100 percent of the time as possible. This is referred to as ‘uptime’ and is the amount of time that a server is online.
What is shared hosting and why is it a bad choice?
The most common form of web hosting is called “shared hosting.” It is the least expensive and, as you might guess, the least powerful.
Sharing your server means if one website gets a lot of traffic, other websites on the server suffer due to the excessive allocation of server resources. All this can cause a loss in traffic and potential customer orders.
Ultimately, using a shared server means you’re sharing the bandwidth and you’re experiencing all of the same problems as the other sites on the shared server – and you have no control over this.
What’s more, if the server is not regularly updated then your data is at risk of being compromised at any time and hackers could attack and bring the server down which will have a significant impact on the security of your website.
The benefits of having a dedicated server
Here at Eat Marketing, if you opt for our website hosting services, you’ll receive a private dedicated server and ongoing website maintenance to ensure your site runs at the highest possible quality.
Having a dedicated server means you have complete control and you’re the only one consuming server resources. This significantly increases both your site’s speed and performance.
As well as rating your customers’ experience on your website, Google also factors your site speed and ‘uptime’ into their overall score of a site’s quality, with slow speeds negatively impacting SEO. A dedicated server provides a faster speed that means your site appears in more online searches, ranks higher in Google and reaches a wider audience.
Of course, with a private server, you are responsible for everything that needs to be done in terms of up-keep. This includes keeping all the software up to date and debugging issues.
This is why hosting with Eat Marketing is of huge value to you.
As we have direct and complete access to the server that is running your website, we can complete regular maintenance on your site specifically and install any kind of niche software you like.
If you opt for our services, you’ll also receive out of hours support which means that if your server does happen to go down, we are on-hand to help anytime to quickly resolve the issue.
You get what you pay for
When doing your research, you’ll see that there are big differences in the prices that hosting providers offer.
It’s important to be aware that anyone who offers you hosting for under £50 is most likely placing your site on a shared server.
We find that the cheaper the price of hosting, the lower the quality of service is included. Using cheap shared hosting is unreliable and will limit a business that aims to grow.
Your online presence, just like your physical shop, deserves a robust and flexible hosting environment to meet your needs now and well into the future.
We hope by reading this blog you now have a better understanding of the value of hosting on a server dedicated to your site. If you’re interested in discovering more about our website hosting services, get in touch with Eat Marketing.
