Use reliable hosting services

Hosting affects the speed, uptime and reliability of your site so choose a hosting service that represents your own site’s level of quality.

A quick Google search on ‘hosting services’ yields thousands of results, with prices starting at ‘free’ or a few dollars per month, and many promising “unlimited bandwidth and storage”. As with so many things, you get what you pay for.

A $5/month hosting service may be fine if you are using the space for testing, or only have a small site with little traffic. These services work by sharing a server with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of customers, so the performance of the server and your site is subject to what other people’s sites are doing on the same computer. If your site is for a business, the chances are that you will need a more robust host.

There are several broad types of host:

  • Shared hosting: as described above, this is usually the cheapest solution but the least reliable. You are sharing a server with an unknown number of other sites.
  • Dedicated hosting: the server is reserved for your use only – as you might expect, this is significantly more expensive.
  • Cloud-based (clustered) hosting: a newer entrant in the market, this is a hybrid option that scales the number of servers depending on your bandwidth and CPU usage.

In the book, we discuss the essential features of reliable web hosts.

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