What is Hosting?
Once you have a domain name you will be able to set up hosting. Imagine the address of a house is what you use to locate the lot on which the house is built, but you can have an address with an empty lot. This is essentially what happens when you purchase a domain, you have an address with an empty lot, now you have to build a house.
Your website uses files and software to run, and your emails require a place for emails to be stored as well as a service to make sure that these emails get delivered to your devices. Hosting is the house, but in reality, hosting is actually a computer that runs the software and has hard drives to store your files. Computers require a physical space, electricity, software, updates, license and loads of other things in order to work. When you pay for hosting you are essentially paying for this computer to be switched on and working. The computers that we use to manage hosting are called servers. They are built specifically for hosting purposes.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you choose a hosting package.
Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting, this means that different websites and emails share the capacity and hardware of the same server. The benefit of shared hosting is affordability. The downside is that if one of the websites on the shared server gets too much traffic it might affect the speed of the other website, however, DOBE has partnered with a great hosting provider to ensure that even on our standard shared hosting packages you get great speeds and reliability and a 99% uptime guarantee.
Dedicated hosting is almost a must if you are expecting a large amount of traffic to your website or you really need to ensure that your website and email services have the best reliability available. The downside is of course the cost of this, having a server dedicated to hosting only your services can be costly, but if utmost reliability is a concern to you, then you may have to opt for this.
Let’s go back to shared hosting, although shared hosting in principle is very much the same, there are different types of shared hosting. At DOBE we offer 2 types of shared hosting options, Standard & Premium. The difference between them is that Premium offers you more disk space, more email accounts, as well as access to website software and features that are not included in the Standard package.
Importance of Hosting
If you already have your own domain and hosting in place, we highly recommend that you transfer this over to us if you are hiring us to build you a new website. There are a couple of reasons why:
- Speed
We are familiar with our hosting provider and have specifically chosen them because we know their services are fast and reliable. Their servers provide the best environment for our website to function and work as they should, and we have built up a relationship with them to ensure that we get the needed support as soon as possible. Subpar hosting will cause your website to load slow and frustrate your users. We have seen in the past that no matter how well we optimize the website in the building and developing stage, if the hosting is subpar the website will suffer.
- Security
Subpar hosting, as well as cheap hosting leaves the door wide open for hackers and other security threats. Our hosting provider has great security in place and you can be assured that if anything goes wrong your data and files are in safe hands. At DOBE we have a strict emphasis on security when it comes to websites. We ensure that our team is up to date on the latest security threats and we force our team to follow strict guidelines on how to manage access and passwords.