- The types of hosting available
- Considerations for picking a good plan that doesn’t cost too much
- How to protect your website even if something goes wrong with your host
Hosting for walled-garden websites
If you are using something like Squarespace, Wix, Shopify etc., then part of what you’re paying is the hosting service. This means the company takes care of all the hosting and makes sure to deliver your website as quickly and efficiently to whoever in the world might be visiting it. Usually they do a good job in order to keep their customers happy but it does mean you can’t really change much.
If you’re using one of these services, the main thing to be mindful of is backups and versioning. It’s true that all of these services have their own automatic backups and the chances of you losing pages because of an outage on their end are pretty much nil. But there are other reasons you should be keeping a local copy:
- You want to revert to an earlier version of a page (or even website).
- Your account is compromised or there are issues that cause it to be closed.
- You want to migrate to a different service/website builder/CMS.
- You want to protect yourself against the event of the service getting hacked/compromised/sold.
We recommend you check out the export process for your website host (here are instructions for Shopify and Squarespace) and do an export before and after any major changes, keeping the files hosted locally. You may also want to keep local versions of any images you upload if these are hard to source again.
If your provider doesn’t have this option there is plenty of free and open-source software that can archive your entire website locally (eg. WebCopy).
Picking a self-hosted platform and plan
If you picture your website as a physical shopfront, hosting is the electricity that keeps the lights on. Good website hosting essentially equates to good website speed and reliable website uptime. When you see brands apologising because their website crashed just as a new sale or product launched, it’s usually because of insufficient hosting. For platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Magento etc you get to pick your web host. There are thousands to choose from, which is both good and bad.
Like with any major decision you’d want to look at reviews but note that major tech industry publications also do annual comparisons and feature analysis of hosts which adds a more journalistic element (for example PCMag’s best web hosting annual list). Web hosting is a messy industry with very large companies that have millions of customers, so the service levels go up and down a lot. It’s also not as competitive as you might think, for example one company alone owns 60 web hosting brands.
Your host should not take your continued loyalty for granted. A bad host can make your life hell so don’t be afraid to ditch yours if need be.
Most major hosts have a range of package types, for example:
| Hosting Type | What is it? | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | The host tries its best to share resources but in theory it’s possible for one website to overload the server and crash all of the others, although this is typically restored very quickly. | The cheapest option. | The slowest/least reliable as you are sharing your server with potentially thousands of the host’s other customers. If you have a business website we’d recommend you go at least one tier above this if you can. |
| Virtual Private Server (VPS) | You get your own resources which sometimes you can split across multiple domains if you own them. You will not be getting your own dedicated machine (hence the ‘virtual’) but the software is set up to segregate your resources from other customers. | Better performance, speed and security.Many hosts have a self-serve process that sets a VPS up for you without you needing to get too into the weeds. | More expensive than shared hosting and can require more tech knowledge to run. |
| Dedicated server | You get your own physical machine(s) allocation. Essentially you are renting entire machines to do nothing but deliver your website to users. | If set up right, the fastest option with the best performance. If your website gets a lot of traffic this may be the only viable solution. | This is the most expensive option and may not be necessary until your website is getting a lot of traffic. |
| Platform-specific (eg. WordPress) managed hosting | The above 3 options are generic meaning you can use it for any website/platform that the host supports. But if, say, you want to host a WordPress website, this is a very standard set of packages so it’s easy for the host to create an optimised environment for WordPress which is what managed hosting is. You can get this for most major platforms but it’s most common for WordPress. | Usually this is similar in pricing to a VPS (or more) but can save you time because it’s preconfigured, and can also perform better. If you’re focussed on just one domain (which you probably should be, see chapter 2), this is the option we’d generally recommend. It usually scales with your traffic too. | Can be more expensive than other options (except dedicated servers). Because your hosting is managed your host may impose some limitations on what functionality you’re allowed to run, but this is rarely a dealbreaker. |
Other considerations for a web host
Speed is a major factor and most of the best-value host companies are located in the US. They do have servers scattered throughout the world, but it’s usually faster if your website is hosted in the country where most of your visitors are. These will usually be more expensive however as these companies are smaller and don’t have the same economies of scale.
Most web hosts will automatically back up your website, but you should definitely look into the following:
- Are these daily? How long are they kept for?
- Does your hosting plan allow you to see these automatic backups, download them and restore your website to one of them in case of a disaster?
- How easy is it to do a manual backup and download it to your own computer and/or restore to it?
Web hosting is a cut-throat industry and there are plenty of customer service disasters out there. One thing to beware of is if your web host has also registered your domain then you have a single point of failure for your whole business. You may want to keep your domain registration separate for other reasons (see chapter 3) but that’s another one.
Given how important website speed is (see chapter 15) it’s also worth reading a potential host’s reviews, or quantitative tests in terms of how fast they can serve a website to users.
