Simple Guide to Choosing the Right Hosting Plan
Web Hosting Blog
If you’re a start-up attempting to launch your business, there will no doubt be a lot on you plate to prepare and consider. Even if you are already established and are in a position to further grow your business online, how do you go about deciding what type of hosting is going to be best suited?
No matter what type of company or organisation you run or work for, having an online presence is vital in this day and age, and for those who don’t have the IT expertise, it can be costly or tricky to know which option to choose.
At CWCS, we want to making hosting as seamless as possible for the businesses we work with. Take a look at our guide to what options are available…
For businesses who are just starting out and have simple requirements, shared hosting platforms tend to be the go-to option as they are simple to get started with and very cost-effective.
Shared hosting is ideal for brochure sites, blog sites, test sites, and for companies who are just looking for an entry-level web presence. With this type of hosting, you are sharing the resources of the server with other sites so there could potentially be 100’s of other sites sharing the same pool of resources and storage. That’s why shared hosting isn’t a viable option for e-commerce sites as a surge in traffic could affect the performance of your site.
Your website should demonstrate who you are and be easy to use, without draining much-needed resources with expensive and unnecessary charges. You’ll need to consider bandwidth, SSL certificates, subdomains and webspace in order to choose the right hosting plan.
Once you start to grow and gain more visitors, then it’s time to look at more advanced hosting options.
Virtual Private Servers are a great option for businesses that have outgrown shared hosting and want to have dedicated resources at an affordable cost. It’s essentially a step between shared hosting and having your own dedicated or cloud server. This removes the potential negative impacts of other businesses impacting your website.
With a VPS you have more control and flexibility, for example, to make installations. VPS hosting is available in Linux and Windows and hosting control panels such as Plesk and cPanel can be installed. This allows you to manage your website and emails and allows certain server configurations to meet your needs.
When it comes to VPS, there are various plans available so you’ll need to consider how many CPU’s (compute power) you need, how many GB’s of RAM and the amount of storage required.
A lot of businesses can be frustrated by the logistical nightmares of hosting their data, either struggling to create the best environment to keep it secure, not having the high-speed internet connection to meet the demands, or the fact that the servers are not in an optimal environment to get the best performance of the servers. Why not remove the need for your office to fulfil data hosting, allowing you to focus on your business?
Colocation allows you to move your servers into the safe environment of a securely managed data centre whilst still retaining complete control over your servers. You can benefit from the data centres round the clock support, security, HVAC, fire protection and also the expertise of the DC’s onsite employees.
Colocation means that you rent rack space but you still retain control and are responsible for software, storage and backups. For businesses who have the technical expertise and simply want to move their equipment to a more secure environment, this is a fantastic option. However, for a start-up, it’s not as practical as you will have a larger upfront cost and will be required to still manage the servers yourself.
Managed Dedicated Server hosting plans provide you with complete control and unrivalled performance levels so you can focus your time and efforts on what you do best.
Linux server hosting plans tend to be the most popular choice as they are available in many flavours including the latest CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat Enterprise, and hosting control panels such as Plesk and cPanel. This lets you customise a server to your precise business needs.
Although a more expensive option, with a dedicated server you will have higher levels of resource, unlimited bandwidth, more cores and threads and also more RAM. Having a dedicated server also gives you root access allowing you complete control.
Businesses will often move over to a cloud hosting platform when they have been having hardware failures and frustrations that are impacting their business.
Although the name can appear off-putting, public cloud hosting is actually one of the most secure and effective ways to host online. With no single-point-of-failure within the infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about downtime. Public cloud is secure, scalable and allows for high performance. With managed public cloud hosting, you can rest assured your service would never be impacted by hardware failure again.
Not only do you get a fully redundant platform but you also benefit from enterprise-grade hardware, reliable network speeds, as well as having the flexibility to choose what operating system and control panel to use.
Private Cloud is specifically designed as a mission-critical system that will never let you down. With four core qualities in mind; security, reliability, scalability and high-performance, your solution can be designed from the ground up.
A Private Cloud platform will safeguard your future, protecting you from damaging downtime whilst being fully scalable to cope with any challenge.
Private cloud solutions include server performance monitoring, essential security updates and an image backup of each cloud server. If you’re looking for a Managed Private Cloud Hosting solution that offers you complete control and peace of mind, allowing you to get on with the running of your business, then a managed Private Cloud solution is the perfect solution for you.
CWCS are passionate about helping businesses grow with the right plans. For more advice or to get set up with one of the hosting plans above, contact our knowledgeable team today, or start a live chat and discover the best solution for your business.