Hosting – Core of Your Online Business
Hosting can make or break your online success. If you want to become and remain successful on line, the core for you online business is to find the perfect hosting company.
I have been looking for The Best WordPress Web Hosting Company that offers affordable and reliable WordPress web hosting solution for quite a while. The good thing is that I think I have found it and I walk through my experiences and lessons learned during my search.
If you are willing to pay big money then you have nothing to worry about… your options are endless. My focus is finding that sweet spot where reliability and service meets affordability. I speak from my first hand experience working with telecommunications and computer systems within the intelligence community prior to there being an Internet. Then I established myself online as an entrepreneur building websites for my own niche marketing when the internet became the norm in our culture.
* * * * * Somewhere on this page is a 10% Off Coupon for D9 Hosting * * * * *
In those beginning days it was expensive to be online. Domain names were costing around $20 per year and hosting services were around $150 per year with very limited server space and data usage. Speeds for online access were at around 9600 baud and everything was dial up connectivity. Every single website was 100% built using longhand HTML coding. This was well before anything like WordPress was even being thought of.
Now I take full advantage of the technology that is out there and only use the WordPress based platform for all of my websites as well as my client sites. WordPress makes it simple to build a site and the versatility of plugins let you accomplish amazing things. You just add a plugin for a specific purpose instead of writing longhand code for anything you want to add.
I have become an expert using WordPress and even moderate the forum in Matt Wolfe’s WordPress Classroom. I answer questions every day that his WPC members come up with. Not only do I answer WordPress questions, but almost anything about Internet Marketing in general.
In using WordPress I have discovered that all hosting companies are not equal. Having hosting services and good prices does not make a company a good host for a WordPress site.
Knowledge is Power! The purpose of me taking the time to write about selecting the right host is that I am hoping to help someone that is just starting out. Learn from my experiences and mistakes. Using the knowledge I share in this document will save you time in the short term, money in the long run and a lot of frustration over the entire time.
Hosting – A Little Backgrounds
I have become very strict when it comes to the reliability of my web hosting company. Server uptime and the server response time are very important for anyone who has a website doing whatever business that they are doing. Available services that the host provides and response time when you have a question could cost you money. If your site is down when a visitor or customer goes to your site then you are losing traffic and business. In addition to losing temporary customers, if your site goes down frequently then there is a good chance that your customers will get annoyed and will try to avoid coming to your site in the future.
Most web hosting companies guarantee 99.9% Server uptime but in reality a lot of them do not deliver 99.9% server uptime that they guarantee. Most of the time you won’t even know that your site was down and you lost customers. If none of your visitors complain it does not really mean that your site was up 100% that month.
Hosting – Possibilities
I started with one little static website and I had no vision where I was headed besides not having a clue what choices were possible. Therefore I suggest that you learn a bit about hosting possibilities.
Some hosting services are very basic and offer one domain name per hosting service. It is true that these hosting services are cheap but probably not affordable. What I mean is that they will cost you in the long run by not providing professional services that meet your needs. Something that cost less often does not provide the goods you expect.
The key things I would look for in a host service if I was just starting out is exactly what I am using today. This is where you really find out what you are getting for your money.
- 99.9% uptime – If they are not up and running neither are you.
- 24/7 responsive support – If I have a question, I need a good answer or resolution to the problem.
- Multi-country and multi-site clean room operational server farms – Operation in a worldwide environment means overall understanding.
- Offsite backup for their server farms – Catastrophic failures happen. They will be prepared to get back to normal operations much quicker. My working experience in Internet Technology gave me real world understanding of real time backup at several locations all the time. If one site goes down another can take over immediately. The disaster on 9/11/2001 is proof of this. The worldwide finance network would have died on that day if it had not been for the multi-location server network.
- Virtual Servers – Provide continual local backup on separate hard drives or entire servers. Each virtual server hard drive (usually 24-36 per server) is divided into individual user space. Sometimes each hard drive is continually backed up on another hard drive and sometime the entire server is backed up with another server.
- Multiple Levels of Hosting Services – This is important to grow your business and its capabilities. It also means you pay as you grow. Common Levels include:
- Standard Shared Plan (unlimited domains, data, space)
- Reseller
- VPS
- Hybrid
- Dedicated
I know this sounds complicated at this point, but it really isn’t. Here are the descriptions from D9 Hosting.
The Standard Shared Plan is the most popular plan and is mainly used by home and small business users who run low to medium traffic websites that don’t require a lot of resources.
The shared plan, as the name suggests, is a shared service where by a number of Clients are all assigned an individual chunk of the server that is theirs to use as they wish. As long as Clients don’t go over the allocated resource usage restrictions there will be no problems hosting on our shared plan.
If a website on the shared plan is using up too many resources and affecting the performance of the server for other users, then you’ll get a recommendation that you upgrade to a semi-dedicated VPS plan or maybe it will be time for you to get a Reseller Plan.
Reseller Plans are very popular amongst web designers and people looking to provide online businesses that require hosting to their customers.
The Reseller plan allows you to provide a hosting service to people under your own white label brand. You still use the D9 Hosting servers, but your clients never even know we exist!
The Reseller plan allows you to create your very own cPanel accounts for any site, everything is managed through your online Web Host Manager control panel.
With a Reseller Plan you would still be on a shared service where by you are sharing resources with other users.
VPS Plan stands for Virtual Private Server, and as the name suggests, it allows you to run your own “virtual server” without the cost of going up to a Dedicated Plan.
An easy way to imagine what a VPS is, is to think of it as your own “Mini Server”. You have one main server that is then split up into a number of “mini servers”, each mini server is a VPS.
All VPSs on the machine have their own operating system and run independently of other VPSs on the server. They also give you guaranteed resources that are not available on a shared service.
So if your site is currently on a shared package and is using too many system resources, then a VPS upgrade is for you!
A VPS is mainly used by web hosts, marketers, medium to large businesses, and clients that run high traffic sites that need guaranteed resources.
A Hybrid Plan runs like a VPS, but instead of having 20 or 30 VPSs running on one machine, the Hybrid plan has between two and four – it’s like a VPS but on steroids!
This means that you are able to have many more resources allocated to your Hybrid plan than you are able to have with a standard VPS.
You are able to have so many resources, that it is actually as powerful, if not more so, than some low spec dedicated servers on the market. So you are able to have the power of a small dedicated server without the added cost.
A Hybrid plan is perfect for people that are outgrowing their VPS plan, or run high traffic sites that are using up too many resources. The Hybrid plan is also a great compromise if you are looking to buy a dedicated server, but are struggling to meet the costs involved.
A Dedicated Server Plan provides you with the ultimate power, control and flexibility for your websites.
Your very own Dedicated server means that you don’t share the server with anyone else, 100% of the resources are yours to use as you see fit.
This makes a dedicated server perfect for users with very high traffic sites that require a lot of resources.
If you have a mission critical site, or need ultimate reliability and stability, then a dedicated server solution is the one for you.
All of D9 Hosting dedicated plans are setup, and ready to go with your very own cPanel and Web Host Manager software.
Hosting – Which Hosting Do I Recommend for a Startup Business?
There are a lot of super cheap hosting packages out there and some of the big names really do not live up to the hype. I used many hosting companies over the years but for the last 5 years I have used nothing but D9 Hosting. I also get all of my names through D9 Hosting because of the convenience of managing all of my online stuff from one place.
The only Hosting Company I would recommend is D9 Hosting. They have it all. Besides D9 Hosting was built by Internet Marketers for Internet Marketers so they have great insight on what we’ll need even before we think we need it.
* * * * * Somewhere on this page is a 10% Off Coupon for D9 Hosting * * * * *
Hosting – Evolution o f the Internet, When I First Started
I began my online experience with Network Solutions. This was many years ago when you had to build your websites using long hand HTML coding. The guys were the cream of the crop when it came to online service at any level. As a matter of fact they were touted as “The Dot Com People” and even though they had a 99.9% uptime guarantee, my ‘Up Time” was nowhere near that, but at the time they were considered the best.
Any time I complained to them about not being able to get to my site they would reply with the result of the UNIX ‘uptime’ command which shows the length of time the system has been up, saying our servers were up all month! The system was up all month doesn’t necessarily mean that your site was not down (The CPU load could have been at 100% so it wasn’t processing any other requests and hence your site was not accessible). The problem was that at the time there was no real competition.
Working online in those days it was very expensive and time consuming. Domain names were costing around $20 per year and hosting services were around $150 per year with very limited server space and data usage. Speeds for online access were at around 9600 baud and everything was dial up connectivity. This was well before anything like WordPress was even being thought of.
Everything took more time and cost more money “back in the day.” As the internet and technology has evolved speeds have increased dramatically, storage capability is huge, access and operation on the internet is very easy.
If you are looking to get online, now is a much better time to make the jump and get your own site going. Of course if you’re a procrastinator you could wait 10 more years it will be even easier, but look at the fun and money you’ll be missing out on. 