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How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for Small Business

How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses

If you’re running a small business or planning on starting one, you may already realize that having a good web host is essential. Choosing the right web host can be tricky, though.

Online shopping continues to overgrow. Retail stores are now almost even with online sales, which increased by 10.4%.

As a business, you can make lots of cash by offering products and services online, but there’s so much more to running a successful website than just sales. Getting your site ranked high on search engines such as Google can also help your traffic.

It’s essential because many consumers will use their smartphones to research local businesses. You can also advertise on social networks such as Facebook.

Today, I’ll explain choosing the best web hosting for small businesses.

Web Hosting Terms

Web Hosting Terms

Hosting providers often use a lot of jargon, making it hard for people unfamiliar with hosting to understand. It cannot be evident even for experienced hosts.

Therefore, you must know some basic terms and how these will affect you.

➢ Uptime

Uptime is how often your site will be available for visitors. It’s usually measured in percentages, so if a web hosting provider claims 99.9% uptime, they mean that their service will be available almost 100 percent of the year.

If you want good results from your online marketing efforts, you must be able to rely on your site being up at all times. It would be best always to choose a reliable hosting provider with an excellent uptime guarantee.

➢ Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to the amount of data and web traffic transferred between your website, users, and the Internet. The more data and web traffic your website consumes, the more bandwidth you require.

The importance of bandwidth varies depending on your website’s size. A smaller website may not require a large amount of bandwidth. But if you’re running a more significant website, you’ll likely need more bandwidth.

➢ Disk Space

Your website’s disk space refers to the amount of storage available for files on your website’s server. The larger your disk space, the more storage you have.

Disk space is essential for websites because it determines how much content you can store on your server. If you have a small site, you won’t need much disk space; however, if you have a tremendous website or upload many images/videos, you may need a lot of storage space.

➢ Domain Name

A domain name combines characters (usually alphabetic characters) and extensions. For instance, our domain name is MyWebMaintenance, and our extension is .com. Visitors need to enter this URL into their web browsers when they want to visit our website.

There are billions of websites; however, most good ones are already owned by someone else. Most web hosting companies will give you a free domain name or one for a low cost. Nonetheless, you cannot create a website without a domain name.

➢ Backups

Backups are copies of your website that can be restored in an emergency. For instance, If your website were hacked, you could use an online backup service to restore your website without waiting for repair services.

Backups are an essential part of any website. They can help you recover from mistakes and disasters. You should make regular backups of your website to restore them quickly if something goes wrong. A good host will offer automated backups for you automatically. But you should also back up your files manually too.

➢ Content Management System (CMS)

CMS software allows you to create, modify, and manage digital content. It’s the tool you’ll use to create your website.

There are several different content management systems (CMS) available for websites. Some of them are better than others. One of the best-known is WordPress.

Most web hosts will tell you which content management system (CMS) they support and may even provide custom servers designed explicitly for that CMS. However, if you pay more, you will see a performance improvement.

➢ Security

Website security refers to how secure your website is from attacks by hackers. It may be one of the most straightforward terms to understand in theory. However, “security” has multiple meanings for different hosting providers.

Some excellent ways to defend against attacks include firewalls, malware detectors, removal tools, DDOS protections, SSL protocols, general software protections on their equipment, and so forth.

However, just because these services exist doesn’t mean every hosting provider offers them for free. Or, at the least, charges extra for using them.

You need to carefully examine their web hosting services’ security features to ensure they’re protecting your website from damage.

Pick the Right Plan

Pick the Right Plan

You now know the basics of hosting, so you’re ready to start choosing a web host. However, there are lots of different options available.

Understanding how many resources your website needs is essential before you start building it. Many websites come with pre-built templates, but they may not be enough for your site. You might want to pay extra for additional resources.

There are usually three options for small businesses who want to host their websites online:

Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is when a company rents out a specific amount of storage on a web host. It is ideal for small websites that won’t need a ton of bandwidth or storage space.

Related: Shared Vs. Managed WordPress Hosting: The Key Differences

VPS Hosting

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) allows you to lease your virtual server. It’s far more costly than Shared Hosting but suitable for big websites that get many visitors and consume lots of resources.

WordPress Hosting

These web servers are customized to run a particular CMS (in this instance, WordPress). Many types of WordPress Hostings are available, including shared and VPS.

Related: What Is Website Hosting And Management? Multiple Web Plans

➢ Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicate means “to dedicate something to someone else.” Dedicated Hosting is when you lease an entire server dedicated to yourself and no one else. Unlike a VPS (which still technically shares its resource with others), a dedicated server is entirely owned by you.

Examine the Pricing Plans Carefully

Choosing a hosting web service that meets your needs is essential, but the cost is just as high.

Web hosting costs are comparable to renting business spaces. They’re usually quite affordable, even if you don’t require a lot of resources.

However, the cost isn’t always clear-cut. Some hosts may be less expensive but may not provide the same support, security, uptime, or overall performance as their competitors.

As long as the site reflects your business, you must ensure it works well. Therefore, don’t just choose the cheapest option.

You can check My Web Maintenance Hosting Pricing Plans

Consider the Environmental Impact

Consider the Environmental Impact

If you’re starting a new business in 2022, you might want to consider its environmental impacts. Web hosts have an emissions problem.

Web servers consume much energy to run 24/7, up to 99.9%. This includes the electricity needed to operate the servers, the server room’s cost, the cooling systems used, and more.

However, there are many alternatives to consider when choosing a web host. At MyWebMaintenence, we calculate the power we use carefully.

Once the calculation has been completed, we buy three times that amount of wind power and send it to the electricity network. This means the more wind power we use, the cleaner our electricity becomes.

Your Website Reflects Your Business

Your Website Reflects Your Business

If you already run a small business, you know the importance of having an attractive storefront.

If you’re looking to go out for dinner, would you instead go to a restaurant that looks clean and well-maintained? Probably yes, and websites are no different. People will notice how quickly it takes to load, how nice it looks, and how easy it is for visitors to use.

If they don’t enjoy your website, chances are they won’t be visiting your physical location either. So, choosing a good web host is essential because it will affect your website’s overall success.

Get Started Today With My Web Maintenance

We’d be happy to discuss our services if you’re looking for web hosting providers to help you provide web hosting & expert management for thousands of WordPress websites. Contact us now for web hosting services and to see how you can get started.

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Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting: The Key Differences

Are you trying to decide between Shared vs. Managed WordPress Hosting? In this post, we will cover the differences between the two.

Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting

Shared vs. Managed WordPress Hosting has been a warm topic in the WordPress community for a long time. And we’re no strangers to the topic either – in our numerous hosting tests, comparisons, and surveys, we’ve come across many exciting viewpoints and opinions from both sides of the barricade time and time again.

However, pitting Shared and Managed Hosting against each other is not as easy as it seems at first glance.

This article will explore what developers and everyday users mean when talking about Shared and Managed WordPress hosting.

Then I’ll go over the specific differences between the two and recommend which option is better in a given scenario.

Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting in a nutshell

The argument between Shared and Managed WordPress hosting revolves around the additional WordPress-specific services and performance improvements you get with Managed WordPress Hosting.

Managed WordPress Hosting resembles an attendant service for your WordPress site, whereas regular Shared Hosting leaves much work to you regarding backups, WordPress optimization, and more.

However, Shared Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting are not inherently different. When talking about Shared Hosting, the term is usually equated with “general low-cost hosting.”

But here’s the thing:

Many shared hosts offer a “managed platform” or “managed services”. These hosts are often counted among the list of WordPress-Managed Hosts.

  • Shared Hosting is just a hosting plan where your website “shares” resources with other websites on the same server.
  • Managed WordPress Hosting is a collection of additional services and performance enhancements offered in addition to regular hosting.

Despite this caveat, we will stick to common usage in this article and treat Shared and Managed WordPress hosting as distinct entities. Even though this is not technically correct, it is correct considering how most people use the two terms.

The main differences between shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting

Shared Hosting in a nutshell

Shared Hosting is about hosters trying to keep their costs down by putting many different websites on a single server. That sounds negative – but it’s not. Shared Hosting serves a purpose.

If shared hosts didn’t do that, none of us would certainly have the ability to host unlimited websites for the same amount we spend at Starbucks every month.

Shared Hosting is an excellent solution for a proof-of-concept site, for example, or a hobby site. And perhaps even for a small business site, as long as it’s a simple “online business card.”

If you were to opt for a professionally Managed WordPress Hosting setup for each of these projects, you wouldn’t be able to test more than 1-2 websites at a time. With Shared Hosting, you can run ten such sites on one server.

Also, you’ll be sharing your server’s resources with dozens or hundreds of other websites, which might slow your website down because something is happening on another website.

Quality shared hosts avoid overloading their servers to prevent this – ultra-budget shared hosts usually offer too much space.

In addition, you usually use a generic cPanel dashboard to manage your website(s).

While cPanel has some WordPress-specific features – such as an installation tool – it’s not explicitly designed to make your life with WordPress easier, as Managed WordPress Hosts dashboards are.

Managed WordPress Hosting in a nutshell

Managed WordPress Hosting consists of several services, performance optimizations, and other add-ons. These additional features:

  • Make sure that your website loads faster, as each configuration is optimized specifically for WordPress.
  • You’ll get tools that simplify WordPress installation and management, as well as tools like staging sites that help you make changes to your WordPress site safely. You’ll get assistance with maintaining your site.
  • Better secure your WordPress site with security rules and features specific to WordPress

In addition to these features, you can usually manage your site through a customized dashboard (although this is not always the case with low-cost WordPress hosts).

Pros and cons of Shared Hosting

Pros of Shared Hosting

  • You often pay a significantly reduced monthly fee.
  • With many shared hosts, you can host unlimited websites for a flat fee.
  • While there is no such point as an “unlimited number of visitors,” most shared hosts advertise an unlimited number and have no set cap on the number of visits to your site.

Cons of Shared Hosting

  • Your website will usually load a little slower because the focus is often on cost reductions rather than performance improvements.
  • Because you share resources, your website load times can also be affected by the activity of other websites on the shared server.
  • You lack value-added features such as automatic updates and automatic backups.
  • They do not always have WordPress-specific performance and security enhancements.

Pros and cons of Managed WordPress Hosting

The pros and cons of Managed WordPress Hosting are a bit more varied…

Pros of Managed WordPress Hosting

  • A server architecture designed specifically for WordPress, which usually means better performance.
  • Built-in caching at the server level, which also means better performance
  • Automatic WordPress updates to maintain your website secure and functional
  • Automatic backups to ensure the security of your WordPress website data
  • WordPress-specific security measures such as firewalls, login hardening, and malware scans
  • A convenient dashboard for website management (though not with all Managed WordPress Hosts).
  • All customer support staff are WordPress experts

Cons of Managed WordPress Hosting

  • Managed WordPress Hosts are frequently more expensive than shared hosts, although you can find a middle ground.
  • They can usually only host WordPress websites (of course).
  • To ensure performance, some Managed WordPress Hosts restrict the plugins you can use. Managed WordPress also hosts usually impose stricter website limits and visitor caps.

Read More: 25 ways to increase website traffic

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