Choosing a web hosting provider doesn’t usually spring to mind when a small business decides they need a website. Most of the time they will go with one of the popular companies that advertise on the television or on YouTube.
In fact, most people don’t really know the difference between website hosting and the actual website as they generally assume that hosting and a website come together.
This is true in some cases with platforms that offer a standard set of features for a price. These can be a good option for newcomers however once you’ve chosen a provider, it can often be hard to change. Additionally, if you’d like to add new features such as a shopping cart etc, the cost can start to add up.
To allow for future flexibility it is often best to start with a website that is flexible and functional and caters for future expansion. This is why we use and recommend WordPress as it is truly one of the most expandable platforms available for websites.
When using WordPress though, you need to “host” the website somewhere with someone on the internet. The respective “somewhere” and “someone” here become important for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, if you are planning on selling your products or services to customers in one country, say Australia, for example, then it would make sense to ensure your website is also hosted in Australia.
This is important so that when a potential customer visits your website, it loads as quickly as possible. If your site loads slowly, customers can become frustrated and may decide to look elsewhere.
Secondly, if you want to get the best performance and speed from the money you’re investing, it pays to make sure the hosting provider is operating in such a way so as to not “limit” the capabilities of your website.
Website hosting is mostly offered on a “shared server” basis, where your website may be running on the same actual server as 100 other websites. To ensure that your website isn’t slowing down other peoples websites, most web hosting companies use a “Control Panel” layer which controls the performance of your website.
This layer allows the hosting company to add “quotas” to your account, meaning you can only have so much data stored and only have so many visitors to your website each month. If you go over your limit, your site may be disabled, and to keep your site running you may have to pay more.
If you’re not sure what your quotas will be, and you go over them, it could lead to quite an embarrassing outcome when your website stops responding mid-month. If you don’t want to concern yourself with these things, then selecting a hosting provider who doesn’t use one of these Control Panel overheads might be a wise choice.
Software engineers at Host Local have created a completely unique platform for WordPress hosting which doesn’t rely on any Control Panel layers and allows your website to perform at its optimal level all the time.
We closely monitor the number of websites on our shared servers and, once any server reaches 50% of capacity, a new server is introduced to the network ensuring that customers will always have plenty of server performance available for their site.
If a customer experiences exceptionally high levels of growth, we can easily offer a dedicated server just for their use and we’ll even migrate their WordPress site to the new server free of charge.
To learn more about how Host Local has created such a unique platform, please reach out to the team for more info.