This week we are going to talk about website hosting.
What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog!
Hosting is kind of a forgotten nuance that not a lot of people consider when they're planning their marketing objectives. I’m going to dig into the do's and don'ts of hosting and what you need to know moving forward.
When you create a website you have a couple of different components. First, and most important, is the domain name. This is your internet real estate. Getting something that is meaningful and memorable is key. The domain act as your traffic cop for any traffic associated with the domain. So there are pieces of information tied to the email, website, and any other services you may be using the domain for.
Hosting, in its most simplest form, is you purchasing access to a some space on a server so that you can make your website or web app available online.
There are a couple of different forms of hosting. We’ll talk about the two most popular:
Most people get shared hosting from a company like GoDaddy or a similar provider. If you are paying five or six dollars a month you are using shared hosting. And this likely means you are on a server with hundreds of other people. You are sharing resources with all of those folks and the performance of your website is likely suffering because the providers have a tendency to oversell the service.
The next step up would be a Virtual Private Server or VPS for short. When you care about the the performance of your website or your web app this is the level of hosting you should be looking for. Virtual Private servers do not have to be expensive. As a matter of fact, one of the providers we suggest has options at about $7 per month. The other nice thing about VPS is that they can scale with your website. So when you start getting more traffic you can scale up.
One of the other things we see when it comes to hosting, that is worth talking about, is the usage of your website hosting to also host your email. We would highly suggest decoupling your website from your email. Email processing is quite intensive. But a better reason to do so is that using a service like Google Apps or Microsoft 365 also gets you additional features for a really low price. It offloads all of the headaches of dealing with email hosting to someone else. And their spam filters alone are worth the investment.
You should care about the performance of your hosting because Google ranks your website based on performance. All things being equal they will rank a fast performing website higher than a slower website. They do not want users wasting precious seconds waiting for a website to load just because you've chosen a bad hosting provider.
If you’re going to go out and choose a hosting provider for your new website and email, who should you pick? The very first company that I would suggest is Arcustech. They are a company that we have used for probably close to ten years. Nevin and the team over there is just absolutely fantastic so I would give them a double thumbs up.
The other one is the company that we actually use for our website which is Liquidweb. We use them because we have a VPS server with them that we can actually store a number of different clients on.
Those would be the two companies that we would suggest. We get nothing for referring you to them, they are just our honest picks. And we know that if you are using either of those two you will not be calling with hosting related issues.
Well, that’s a wrap for this week! I want to thank you for checking in. Make sure to hit that like button. And if you have any questions or comments leave them down below. If you want to talk about how Blue Fish can help you grow your business just send us a message and we’ll get the conversation started!