Hosting is often one of the most overlooked aspects of making a website work harder. Far too many sites sit on cheap and slow shared servers. Hosting in this environment might save a few pounds but can cost you in the long term.
Having gone to all the effort of planning, designing and building a brand new website, we prefer to see them living on a hosting platform that’s fit for purpose.
Reducing your site’s loading time by seconds (even milliseconds) can have a very positive effect on your placement in search results.
The hosting environment and optimisation of your site for load time is something we focus on before every site goes live.
There are various types of hosting available – below are the three most common.
Shared hosting means one server, lots of sites. If your site lives on a shared hosting account, the server resources are shared between all the sites on the server. Different hosts have different amounts of sites that they will put on shared hosting accounts – it can run to hundreds. Shared hosting can be perfect for many websites. It’s a good place to start before deciding if you need something more.
A VPS, or Virtual Private Server is the next step up – it ‘mimics’ a dedicated server environment whilst actually being in a shared environment. We often set up VPS’ for one site only so all the resources are used just by one site. VPS’s require management, so they are more expensive to use.
If you’ve got a WordPress site, it makes sense to host it on dedicated WordPress hosting. Toast use this for larger sites. It’s fast, secure and managed meaning your site will load quickly – something that can effect its placement in search results. We strongly recommend specialist WordPress hosting for your site.