As this decade is completely driven by the online landscape, everyone knows the importance of a website. No matter what business you run, your website is the voice of your company and it should be appealing for the customers to visit.
But how much does it cost to build a website? Does it cost too much?
There is a reason why managed server hosting is considered one of the best web hosting solutions for medium to high traffic websites. The website owner gets a server fully managed by a team of expert technicians in the hosting company. The web owner would then won’t have to bother with the technicalities of the hosting package. Every technical and network-related issues will be dealt with by the hosting provider.
However, despite its demand, there still seems to be a lot of misconceptions and myths about managed hosting, particularly managed dedicated hosting.
Here are a few popular myths busted.
#1. Managed dedicated hosting is too expensive
Considering the fact that dedicated hosting solutions are comparatively more expensive, it’s obvious that people think a managed hosting service would be even more expensive. Managed hosting is certainly going to cost more than unmanaged hosting. But when considering the benefits of such a hosting solution, the extra cost is totally justified.
The web owner won’t have to worry about server maintenance, server upgrades, uptimes, downtimes and technical issues. The team managing the server would be monitoring it 24/7 and performing all the updates and security checks while the owners go about with their business. They won’t have to pay for extra staff or rent space for setting up a server either. Ultimately, it does save them time and money.
#2. Managed hosting is only for people who are not tech-savvy
Though it’s the ideal option for people who are not very keen on technologies, it can also be of great benefit to tech-savvy web owners as well. If it’s managed, the web owners, tech-savvy or tech-not-that-savvy, would be from the hassles and challenges of maintaining a redundant server setup.
Technical issues, should they appear, won’t be interrupting their work or taking their time. The service essentially saves time and effort while providing a plethora of benefits.
#3. You don’t get to choose the software
This used to be the case in the beginning. And many hosting providers offering dedicated servers design their packages to meet business needs. Reputed providers would be using the most reliable and secure software in their servers promising the best performance. However, you will still be able to install custom software that you require after discussing with your web host. But in most cases, it’d be better to trust in your host’s experience and expertise when it comes to software choices.
#4. For that cost, the data will always be safe and secure
This is why people are willing to go that extra mile and pay more for a better hosting solution. Renting a dedicated server means only their websites would be on the server, and they get more control. A reliable hosting company would guarantee the safety of the machine as well. However, the hard truth is that no matter how good the provider is or how secure the hosting server, there are always risks.
A managed hosting server set-up will be constantly monitored to ensure that there are no failures at any time. However, there are circumstances, though very rare, that could result in a short server downtimes, outages etc. even if it’s a cloud hosting solution.
Not many web owners choose to spend time researching a web hosting provider before purchasing a hosting package. Most of them tend to approach popular hosts and make the deal in a jiffy.
Because web hosting is a diverse and competitive sector, as a web owner, you need to be aware of the various myths and facts associated with hosting. These are just a few of the most popular misconceptions on dedicated hosting. Hopefully the article would help you find a better hosting choice.
Now that you know the fundamentals of web hosting, you can give the hosting business a shot. But you need the world to know what you are doing, and the kind of services you offer. This guide can give you an edge, and help you market your web hosting business the right way.
As a beginner, you can leverage what you already have to make your business known. Here are 6 ways you can do just that.
One of the best marketing tools available for any businessman with big dreams. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, if used wisely, can accelerate the growth of your business while garnering loyal followers. Start by creating accounts in popular social media platforms, and then building a profile with information about your company, links to your company blogs and website etc.
Do not rush it and start promoting your business right away. Establish yourself in the online community by posting relevant news articles, and make your presence known in tech forums. Though this approach takes a good amount of patience and time, you will end up with many followers. Then you can promote your business in a way that your followers would become your customers and spread the news.
Anyone who wishes to start a business online would be familiar of the term SEO. Search engine optimization is what you do to get your website and business noticed by search engines, and have your website ranked high in search engine result pages (SERP).
SEO is not that complicated. You can find a number of articles that explain the general concept, and learn helpful tips to improve your ranking in Google, the most widely used search engine in the world.
Once you understand the concept, you can begin by using tools like Google Analytics to identify the terms people use to search for the services your business offers. Seed those words or ‘keywords’ on the content and landing pages in your website to catch the attention of search engine crawlers, and boost your relevance in searches. Earning backlinks from other reputed websites can give your website a significant SEO boost.
As the name suggests, backlinks are basically links that take users back to your website from another website. Google values backlinks a lot. A couple of high-profile backlinks can give you a great boost in search engine rankings. Earning backlinks won’t be easy. You will need to get in touch with other businesses similar to yours, do favors, and earn backlinks from them.
You can post popular articles related to your products/services from reputed websites, and request backlinks in return. Do not expect results overnight but when you start getting backlinks, you will notice the impact on your website’s rankings.
Email newsletter is how you get your message to people who would be interested in the services you offer. Email newsletters are mostly targeted to a specific audience – your subscribers. There are plenty of email newsletter platforms available to manage your contacts, and schedule newsletters to be sent to them. Most platforms won’t cost you more than $30 a month.
Email newsletters can also be used to give promotional offers to subscribers encouraging them to try out your services instead of simply advertising them.
Post relevant articles. Get people to read them. Sit back and watch your business’ increasing popularity. Sounds easy, right?
Not so in practice.
Well written, informative, and interesting articles are not that easy to write. But they do give exponential results. Articles can increase your followers, get them to visit your website via backlinks and increase web traffic, and can enhance your business presence in more ways than you think. Relevant, good quality articles also positively influence your SEO.
A single article can continuously drive traffic to your website. One impressive article is better than having ten run-of-the-mill articles that people don’t want to spend time reading. You can post articles on your websites and on free article-submission platforms to increase followers. Make sure to promote your best articles through social media platforms.
Forums are online communities where people get together to discuss various stuff. It’d be easy for you to find forums that discuss web hosting. All that’s left is to contribute information, make yourself known, make friends, and build trust with people. If your services are good, they will help get your business more exposure.
Digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprises may have its benefits. But according to research from leading market analysts, the digitization also increased the cost of data breaches. Consequently, the financial loss due to cybercrimes is predicted to exceed $2 Trillion by 2019.
Web security experts and web hosting companies have already started rolling out guidelines to web owners to educate them on fortifying their digital defenses. Tech behemoths like Google have implemented advanced firewalls to protect their web assets from cyber-attacks. The search engine giant also recommended measures to protect web properties. Among those, the two most significant measures include:
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was introduced by Netscape as an encryption technology to encrypt the connections between web servers and the viewers’ web browsers. SSL secures the connections ensuring safe data transfers, and protects the data from intrusions, tampering, and forgery.
In a nutshell, an SSL certificate is basically a padlock with a cryptographic key. The ‘padlock’ is a combination of small data files that can be installed on a web server. Once installed, the file invokes https protocol and activates the ‘padlock’ to secure connections from a server to a web browser.
To put it in technical terms, SSL certificates use two public keys and one private key. The public keys secure the connection with encryptions while the private key decrypts. The keys add one additional layer of protection to your data, securing your messages from the rest of the world, and from cyber threats.
Your web hosting company can give you these 5 types of SSL certificates using the same standard encryption methods. However, each type has its own requirements.
These are 5 important SSL certificates your website can use. Buying one is quite hassle-free, and you can set one up by contacting a domain registrar. You can also have a reputed web hosting company do it for you.
Ever heard of a hosting solution that offers unlimited add-on domain capacity, unlimited storage size, and unlimited data transfer? It’s real and is generally termed “Unlimited Hosting”. So basically you get to have many websites hosted by the web hosting company at an affordable price.
This means you won’t have to rely on expensive dedicated hosting servers, right?
Wrong.
It may seem impressive, but it’s clouded by a lot of myths. We need to dig out the truth behind unlimited hosting before deciding to go for one.
When it comes to digital services and products, the terminologies differ. For example, “unlimited” literally means having no limits or end. But technically, it’s not the same when it comes to hosting. In a nutshell, what they mean by unlimited hosting isn’t actually ‘unlimited’ hosting in the literal sense.
Unlimited hosting is limited in reality.
Let’s get technical.
The idea of unlimited hosting will give people dreams of having terabytes of their images and videos stored on their web host. That will just stay as a dream though, because there are limitations. Take the physical world for starters. You will need unlimited RAM and CPU to make that dream come true. That means you are going to need unlimited semiconductors to make infinite RAM and CPU, not to mention unlimited cables for unlimited bandwidth. And hire unlimited people to maintain those unlimited servers and networks. Hope you get the point.
‘Unlimited’ is just a term hosting companies use to bait uninformed website owners. They run the business for money.
To get a better idea, think about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can’t eat too much obviously, but you can eat all you want to. Unlimited hosting is similar. You can use as much disk space and bandwidth as you want, but you obviously wouldn’t want that much.
You won’t be able to eat more at an all-you-can-eat buffet once your stomach is rigged to explode. Similarly, you won’t be able to use more ‘unlimited’ stuff in an unlimited hosting plan once a certain limit’s reached.
The hosting provider will most certainly have house rules that you need to abide by while using their ‘unlimited’ hosting solutions. There would be a red zone, where you won’t be able to move further. Once your website hits the red zone using all the ‘unlimited’ resources, the hosting provider would simply pull the plug or pull you back by charging you more for the service. This is how it works.
Now you might be thinking that this was just another scam from dishonest businesses. That’s not always the case, because there are bright sides to unlimited hosting too.
A large hosting company will have an inexplicable amount of resources like manpower, servers, bandwidth lines etc. A single website practically will not be able to exceed such an amount of resources in its life. Generally, most websites will not need that much resources to function properly with all features working fine.
In such a situations, many companies would go for overselling i.e. reselling their unused hosting capacity – the remains after websites use up the required resources.
Unlimited hosting may seem like an unethical practice but that doesn’t necessarily mean the hosting company is bad. What matters is an efficient server and reliable technical support. As long as they deliver those two, the companies shouldn’t be criticized for their way of doing business.
So should you go for unlimited hosting?
You can if you want to, after making sure the hosting company delivers quality service of course, and is not a substandard company trying to grab as much money as they can.
The easiest way to decide whether the hosting company’s ‘unlimited’ deal should be taken is to sign up for a trial of the service by spending a little amount of money, and then look at the things you are getting from the service – the support, the quality, performance, efficiency, reliability, resources etc. If you don’t like what you see, you can cancel the service during the trial period itself. You can also check reviews or contact existing clients of the company to get some feedback on their services.
