General information about Internet Hosting

Internet Hosting to an end user is pretty dull, but there are sound reasons why you should be taking a bit more interest in how your website appears online.  The speed of your internet host servers and connections will determine how quickly your site loads.  If it loads slowly, or keeps failing then it may well turn away visitors to your site.  Of course, a badly optimised website with large images will load slowly on the fastest host – but then I don’t build poorly optimised sites!

Over the years I have had plenty of experience with good internet hosts, and also some really bad ones.  I’ve spoken in previous blogs about the need to check your website daily to ensure it’s working – this is from bitter experience with bad internet hosts.  Most internet hosts won’t know if your specific site isn’t working, unless the server you are running from has failed and “they are working on it”.

The vast majority of Internet hosting packages will mean that your website is on a shared server, and it’s the cheapest way to get your site online.

Shared means that your website shares the servers resources with any number of other websites.  The server has a pool of resources (memory and processors) and each site gets a slice of them when needed.  This could be 50 or as many as 500 other websites sharing this pool of resources.  With some hosts there is usually little consideration taken as to how many may overload each server.

There is a more costly alternative of dedicated hosting where you have a server solely just for your website. It has it’s own resources specifically assigned to it such as RAM (Memory) and Processors.  This kind of hosting will cost you more in the long run, but provides the best level of performance and security.  It’s pretty unlikely that most business sites will require this level of performance, unless running a large eCommerce system for example.

So what are the drawbacks of slow Internet hosting?

Primarily the biggest issue will be usability of your website by visitors.  If your site takes a while to load then it may stop people from hanging around and browsing.

Secondly the speed of your pages loading is a ranking factor used by search engines. This is again down to the usability of your website – a faster site provides a better experience for visitors over a slow one.

Can I recommend good Internet hosting for you?

Yes I can!  Although I can build and support your website on any internet host, I have been freelancing with Asset ICT for 3+ years now. They have looked after all my domain names and Internet hosting for the many websites I run (my first domain name was registered back in January 2006).  You can see how fast my site loads to get an idea of how good they are. The company has been running for over 12 years doing what it does, and their shared hosting servers are not overcrowded.

Hosting packages start from £3 per month which is perfectly adequate for a basic business WordPress website.