What You Need to Know About Website Hosting
– By #RSA
Choosing a hosting provider can be overwhelming. With so many hosting services to choose from it can be difficult to select a service that is right for your company.
The main factors when considering website hosting should encompass the following factors:
• Website Size
• Database size
• Visitor Bandwidth
• Platform requirements
Website Size
The size of your website includes the overall number of pages your website contains (active as well as inactive), the size of the database (see the following section), the size of any add-on applications or widgets, and the number and size of images and photos used on your website. The minimum number of pages is usually 5 for good search engine indexing results (although the trend in the past couple of years has been single page websites, which may not suit most client needs). Websites for larger institutions may contain hundreds, if not thousands of pages. Most large organizational website are database driven, again, we will discuss this in the next section.
Images and photos can take up an inordinate amount of space. Especially if you are uploading images or photos larger than needed for the website or page requirements. One of the greatest factors that can negatively impact hosting costs is by uploading large or uncompressed images. Most full-width images rarely need to exceed 1920 pixels in width, while images used to cover have the width of a page or smaller do not typically need to be larger than 992 pixels in width. When our clients use an excessive amount of bandwidth in a given month it is usually do to them having uploaded images and photos that are much larger than needed.
Database Size
If your website contains a lot of pages generated by a database, the size of the Content Management System (CMS) may not be very large, but the site itself may have one of more databases providing the content viewable by visitors. The addition of applications and plugins may also require separate databases. Websites that use multiple databases may require separate servers for the databases in order for the website itself to perform efficiently.
Visitor Bandwidth
If you have a website that is visited by 10,000 unique visitors or more within the span of a month, week, or day you may need one or more dedicated servers to meet your website performance and storage needs. Especially if your website contains large numbers of images or photos.
Platform Requirements
You may require larger or scalable hosting when using any number of website platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, OpenCart, Magneto, etc. If you are in the process of developing a new site, open-source platforms may be the easiest and simplest platforms to use. However, each platform has its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to scalability. Oftentimes, open-source platforms are restrictive. You may end up sacrificing page load time when using an open-source platform as your website grows.
For Example; while we do host WordPress websites at Robert Sharp & Associates, the single greatest issue with WordPress is the fact it replicates and stores multiple versions of a single photo or image. Whenever you select a size of a photo to place within a page or post, WordPress creates multiple images depending on the size of image you wish to use or whenever an image’s size has been edited.
Robert Sharp & Associates can help you determine your web hosting needs. We offer our clients hosting on virtual servers as well as dedicated servers. Allow us help you determine if your current hosting needs are meeting the needs of your website as well as your customers. Give us a call at 605-341-5226!
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