Future Steps Creative Podcast – Episode #83
Listen or view below:
Bad-quality hosting could be what holds your website back. In this episode, I explain what to look for when choosing a website hosting service so that you can get the best performance out of your website.
Main Takeaways/Overview
*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.
00:00 Tips for choosing hosting service, avoiding mistakes.
03:08 Low-quality hosting can lead to website issues.
07:57 Ensure adequate bandwidth to handle traffic spikes.
09:59 Inodes measure files on a website, affecting limit.
13:48 Site down, data lost, risks of cheap options.
16:41 Will speak to you soon.
Transcript
*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.
And then lo and behold, they start running into shoes where the website is running slow or they are running into errors, database connection issues, or the Steps just, like, going down all the time and stuff like that. This is because there are different levels of quality to the hosting provider as well as the hardware in terms of the resources that they allocate to your website. Because your hosting is actually, the website is being hosted on a server, which is essentially a very large computer with lots of drive space and lots of processing power so that it can actually run many websites. Right? So when you go with the rock bottom pricing, type of hosting, you’re normally on what’s called, shared hosting, which is the traditional shared hosting, meaning that they have lots and lots of people lumped in to the same hardware that you’re sharing these resources with on that server. And oftentimes, what you find is that your website isn’t getting enough resources allocated to it because if somebody someone else on that platform is hogging all the resources lines. Let’s say they have a lot more traffic. They’re doing something on their website that’s just eating up all the resources. It could end up like taking away resources from you and from everyone else that’s actually sharing that same space.
Marlon McPherson00:04:31 – 00:05:21
And, that might be okay for you if you’re running a hobby website. But if doing a mission-critical website. You need to make sure that it is reliably running so that when people come to it to do business or whatever it is that your goal is for that website, that it is always up and running and running fast. Right? Because people there’s nothing, worse than people coming to our website that’s running slower and loading very slowly. They’ll just turn away from that site. And you also won’t be in good stead with Google and all the other search engines that rely on serving up web pages to searches or to people who are searching for things because the slower websites don’t tend to rank in those search results. Right? So you’re doing yourself a disservice when you do that. So what do you do? Well, I would say go for the better quality hosting.
Marlon McPherson00:05:21 – 00:06:16
So don’t go for the ones that are, like, $5, $10, or what? $5 or or so, and it’s shared. Because just for a little bit more money, you could get a better quality cloud service, which may still be shared resources, but it’s just on at a higher level where you’re getting better quality hardware. So, that you’re not likely to run out of resources that easily and there are less people typically sharing that space. Right? So, what I’m gonna do without further ado is give you some tips on what to look for, just when you’re trying to set up a hosting service or looking for a hosting service to go with. So first of all, you need to choose the right service provider. Now you, of course, could look at reviews online and so on. And, of course, you wanna avoid the typical ones that are, like I said, are rock bottom pricing. GoDaddy is a culprit.
Marlon McPherson00:06:17 – 00:07:02
A lot of people get sucked into their marketing and their pricing structure where they just offer these really cheap hosting offers. Well, the quality is just not there. I have been on GoDaddy, and, customers of mine have been on GoDaddy. You wanna avoid those that are, they don’t essentially let me start with the the hardware quality. What you need to look for with the hardware quality is you’re making sure that they at least tell you what type of equipment they’re using. Right? So if they’re not telling you the equipment that they’re they’re using, or you’re not able to, even if you ask them, it’s not advertised on a website. But even if you ask them, they’re not necessarily giving you details. Chances are you’re using a poor quality hosting.
Marlon McPherson00:07:02 – 00:07:56
It could potentially be like spinning hard disks, which is like very old technology now because most of the, hosting providers now all using SSDs, which is solid state storage or drives. And that is gonna be much faster to get your website loaded. Of course, you might not get, like a large capacity because it’s more expensive to operate those types of, setups with SSDs because SSDs are more expensive than older spinning disks. But That being said, you might not necessarily need a large amount of space if your website is just starting out. So you wanna make sure that you’re at least getting some SSD, MVNE drives maybe. These are like super fast. You wanna also look out for, the traffic allowance. So you’ll see in the package that you choose.
Marlon McPherson00:07:57 – 00:09:06
They might have, say, this many visitors per per month or they might say bandwidth. Just make sure that’s adequate enough for you. Again, if you’re running a small site, just starting out and you don’t you don’t expect a tonne of traffic immediately, You can, you can go with something that has a decent enough amount of bandwidth or traffic allowance per month. Now the risky run when you have a cap on this is that, what will happen is that if you’re running some kind of campaign online, like advertising or marketing in some kind of way. You might end up having a spike in traffic where lots and lots of people are coming through because you’re promoting something, and it could crash your site. And this happens to, like, big corporations as well. You know, when they’re running a sale or something like that, it can crash a site or if somebody’s just had like a brand has just had like some media exposure like on national TV or something like that, and lots of people are coming to their website, it can crash the site. And this is just because they don’t have enough bandwidth on the package that they’re on to allocate, to the amount of traffic they’re getting so that the servers are being overloaded.
Marlon McPherson00:09:06 – 00:09:58
And the only way to solve this problem is to to increase the the bandwidth. But if you’re on shared hosting, it’s not as flexible to do it in real-time or as quickly as, as that because it’s not designed for that. But with normal traffic situations, you should be fine. So if you can go with unlimited, if you find one that’s unlimited, then that’s better because it doesn’t cap you on the amount of traffic. But you might still be, restricted by the the other resources that I’ll touch on like the hardware requirements and stuff or the hardware entitlements that you have might actually restrict you on on that sense. So even though you the traffic might not be capped, The more people that come to the site, the more resources it’s still going to to need outside of what it says with the traffic allowance. So that’s traffic allowance. Let’s talk about inodes.
Marlon McPherson00:09:59 – 00:11:03
Inodes is something that I learned about when I was on, another cloud service provider that restricted this. Now Inodes, as far as I understand it, is the number of files that’s on your website. So if your website is pretty small, you’re not posting a lot to it very often, it’s probably not going to reach a certain amount. And Inodes are or the file limit is not necessarily advertised. You normally have to dig in to find it, Or you might just run into it if you’re running a site where you’re posting a lot to it, right, which is what happened to me in the past. I was just running my site and then I got a notification from it was Siteground at the time, and Siteground is pretty good hosting by the way. However, it’s just for my purposes, if you’re running like, if you were doing something like what I was doing, with the amount of files or adding to my websites and stuff like that. I was quickly running out of inodes and then to upgrade to the the higher plans, was, like, not as cost effective for me.
Marlon McPherson00:11:03 – 00:11:40
So I went with another solution. But then I’m a more advanced Future, so I understand that. But for, you know, a typical person, typical businesses, they might not run into that issue. But it’s just something to bear in mind. Okay? You wanna also think about the, if they tell you let’s go back to the hardware. One thing I forgot to mention is they might actually allocate a certain amount of RAM, read only read, what is it? Random access memory, not RAM, RAM. So the memory, just like in a computer, you might have a certain amount of RAM. Like in my laptop, I might have 8 gigs or 16 gigs of RAM.
Marlon McPherson00:11:40 – 00:12:26
That is just to to be able to run the amount of programmes that I have running simultaneously and keep that, like, open. Keep those open. Right? So Servers operate in the same way for your website. So, I would say if you are if you have a choice with the RAM to go with, like 1 to 2 gigs of RAM, if this is something that you have a choice in. Again, if they don’t tell you, just like with the storage space, the hard disk or the the drive space because it could be an SSD, it should be. They might not wanna tell you this upfront if it’s super cheap, because normally you’re just on the bare minimum. So if you could see this, this is a good thing. If it tells you, okay, you’ve got this amount, of, RAM, then you know that at least you’re on most likely better quality hosting.
Marlon McPherson00:12:27 – 00:13:10
And then the final thing that I’ve got for you, there Obviously, it could be other tips that I could give you as well, but these are the main ones, is the customer services. Right? One thing you could do is look up reviews and see what people are saying about their customer services, see that they have Future, make sure that they’ve been around for a while. You don’t wanna put your your your eggs in the basket of a new host that hasn’t got a track record, especially for your money sites or your mission critical sites. Okay? I’ve recently lost a site. Well, I’m in the process of I’m hoping that I haven’t completely lost it. I’ve got backups, but not the most recent recent backups from when, basically, the site went down. But it was a project that’s not like mission critical anyway. So it’s not a big deal for me.
Marlon McPherson00:13:11 – 00:13:48
But, I I went with a new host for this particular project that, they’ve only been around for, like, a very short time, only for a few months. And they were running these really special promotional deals to get users on board, including a lifetime deal with limited resources. Courses. Right? And I took took that up. I took the offer. And sometimes you have to gamble with these, but I just used it for like a testing ground or to host host, like, something that’s not mission mission critical. What happened is that they, their servers went down. My site is not accessible.
Marlon McPherson00:13:48 – 00:14:53
And when I looked up when I tried to go to access the site, first of all, their site was completely down, so I had no way to log in to my account to see what’s going on. And I ended up having to go to their Facebook page to only to only to find out that they got hacked or, got breached. What happened is that someone went in and deleted a lot of their servers or their server resources, including their customers’ data, their sites, etcetera. Lots of files got lost. And I’m guessing that one one of those, my site is amongst, those files that got lost because, you know, there’s no no way for me to tell then. Just wait to see if the site comes back online spontaneously. So these are the risks that you take when you go with, like, the cheapest option or options that are risky, what can you know, perceived as risky. So, I’m not gonna necessarily give you any recommendations here, but, you know, because what I do for for my clients, if you don’t know, I run a small web agency where we set up websites and manage websites for our clients.
Marlon McPherson00:14:54 – 00:15:52
And what we do is we just handle the hosting for them. So part of the service is that, we offer, hosting with our plans. And depending on what, you know, service they’re going with that we offer, that’s lumped in, or we might recommend if they want to host host on their own. We might recommend certain hosting to go with because, you know, we wanna make sure that their Steps running fast, they have, the ability to get good quality service and so on, right, considering all of the points that I’ve mentioned before. So, you know, you need to Is it worth you setting up your own hosting and stuff like that? It just depends on, where you’re at in your journey. If you’re just starting out and you just wanna spend the time, if got time on your hands and so on to do it, then fine. You can go and test it out. And then when you’re ready, there’s always always the option to go with a service provider, a go with a service that handles all of that for you, which is certainly what we do.
Marlon McPherson00:15:52 – 00:16:41
And this is not a commercial for, mobile agency. But I just wanted to mention whether it’s, you know, my kind of my service or somebody else, it’s just better to have it handled for you because there are a lot of technicalities when it comes to hosting. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just gonna run into issues that you can’t handle. And if you don’t have the support behind you, then that’s a big problem, especially if you’re running a business that needs to make money. So that being said, taking to to consideration, all these things that I’ve mentioned before. And, if you wanna learn more about anything to do with website strategy for your organic online content strategy so you can grow your business or your brand. Check out one of my other pieces of content linked on screen if watching the video or in the description. And I will catch you in the next one.
Marlon McPherson00:16:41 – 00:16:42
Exclude
03:09 – 16:43
Speak to you soon.