Understanding the importance of a web hosting service provider is a lot easier when put into everyday context. If you were to have a friend hosting a party in your honour, assuming the occasion was important to you, wouldn’t you want to ensure that the host is up to the task? Or would you just call the first person on your contact list and ask him/her to be your host?
More Than Just Servers And Routers
The web directories for web hosting companies across Dublin and Ireland are filled with options for hosting your site – but which are the good ones? When you review some of those sites, you’ll likely be impressed by the infrastructure listed:
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• 100% Uptime VPS Servers
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• Redundant Routers
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• SSD DRIVES AND Multi Core CPUs
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• RAID-10 disk drive arrays
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• …and a lot more
In reality however, it’s more than just servers and routers that go into hosting your website. Here are four important aspects of keeping y7our website visible on the web that you should consider when selecting your hosting service provider:
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1. Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, VPS, Cloud, Cloud Dedicated? Just like hosting your party in a public place, along with other parties, versus having it at a friend’s private residence - your choice of hosting service will impact the performance and availability of your website. While “shared”, “semi-dedicated” or “dedicated” might all sound ok for you, you must be aware that other websites running on the same 'shared'web hosting server as yours will sometimes encroach on your websites performance - much like the loud music from the adjacent party would spill over into your garden.
You need to carefully study the other forms of hosting too, including Cloud hosting, Cloud Dedicated or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). If all of this confuses you, then you need to speak with an experienced and professional website management agency first, before making a decision on what type of host will host your website.
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2. Regular Host Maintenance Would you be happy with a web hosting provider that does frequent maintenance to its servers/infrastructure during the working week? What about being “down for maintenance” for an hour on 2 consecutive working days? If your friend organised the party so that catering staff walked in and out of the venue every half-hour or so, wouldn’t that be a huge inconvenience to your guests? Beware of hosting services that overdo maintenance – it could cost your site too much in down time! And remember, a hosting company is USA doing 4am server updates that take down your website are not too pushed about your Irish website where the local time is 9am to 11am approx.
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3. Payment Plans: Annual, Monthly? You may come across companies offering web hosting in Dublin on annual (or even longer!) payment plans. While doing the maths, you may even discover that it is less expensive to sign a 12 or 24 month deal, compared to making monthly or quarterly payments.
While in some cases the discount offered in annual payment may be worth it...beware of making such payments. If you are just launching your website, you don't know how well (or badly!) the site will perform in a year's time, necessitating a decision to switch service plans or providers. Why tie yourself to a service that you may need to discontinue or alter in a year’s time? Generally speaking the small print with those hosters states that your payment is non refundable so you'll be leaving plenty of money behind you that you can't get a refund on – even though you're moving to a new hosting company.
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4. Disk Space And Bandwidth: Returning to our analogy of your party: What if your host planned for 50 guests, but three times that number showed up instead? Should the additional guests be hosted? If not all of them, then who gets to stay and enjoy your hospitality, and which ones are turned away?
When hosting a website, similar constraints and limitations may be applied on the amount of disk space and bandwidth you can use. However, beware of web hosting service providers who offer “unlimited” disk space or bandwidth (upload/download capacity). Look into the fine print carefully to make sure certain types of files or content (videos, graphics etc.) aren’t omitted from your ‘unlimited quota’. The detail in these contracts is extensive and you need to take a few hours to go through everything and make sure you're not going with a poor company that will limit your website growth and have you leaving them in a few months and even more expense to you.
A Party Worth Having
Choosing a provider for web hosting in Dublin is akin to making the tough decision on which friend to ask to host your party. If you choose the right host, then your party will be worth having. Choose the wrong one and that could be the start of a split.
In today’s business environment, a website is your primary online identity. If it is hosted inappropriately, your business brand could be irreparably damaged, and in some instances forever destroyed.
So, before you make that decision on picking a partner for hosting your website, think carefully about all of the points discussed above. Then, reach out to a professional website management company and ensure all of the items raised here are addressed to your satisfaction. If you have some unanswered questions about your hosting we'd be glad to go through all the options with you and find a solution that is perfect for your company. Call us on 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .
