3 min read

How to Choose the Right Website Hosting

McKenzie Johnson : January 09, 2023

Hosting

Our Marketing Director, Clay Kraby, sat down with Joe Sandin, Owner and CEO of Onsharp, to discuss some important questions you may have about website hosting.

They had a great conversation about what hosting is, the benefits of good hosting for your website, and what to look for in a good hosting provider.

Here are some important questions they addressed:

What Makes a Hosting Provider Good?

Your company has put a lot of time, money, and effort into perfecting its website. Why stop there? Good hosting ensures that your website is working properly and is always secure from a security stand point.

Once your website has been built it is essential that you continue to optimize its performance and deliver the content your clients came to your website to find. Hosting should not be set aside and forgotten, it is an integral part of your overall presence online.

How Does Cheap Hosting Differ from Managed Hosting?

Cheap hosting options can cost as low as $4 a month, but that doesn’t mean it is a good choice. Typically, when hosting is cheap all the company is doing is making the website accessible online. You are the only one that is responsible for managing the site and all the hard work falls on you. You are responsible for making the appropriate website updates, ensuring your website is meeting all security requirements, and that you are always prepared for any potential security breaches.

At Onsharp, our Website Essentials Program is a premium hosting service which handles everything needed to be done in order to host a successful website. We take care of everything from making quarterly website updates to making sure your site is secure at the highest level.

What are Some Security Considerations When Looking for Website Hosting?

Site security is a very critical part to good web hosting. Something as basic as an SSL certificate will encrypt the traffic between your customer, the server, and your website. This is one thing that we take care of through our Essentials program at Onsharp.

You also want to make sure that you are regularly backing up your site. Completing these backups is essential because if there were ever an issue with your website and the previous version needs to be restored, you will always have that copy.

Another benefit of our essentials program is that we will make all updates to your WordPress site as well as all the plugins. These technologies are constantly changing which is why it is important to have a knowledgeable resource that you can rely on to take care of everything. With systems like these you cannot implement them put them and expect it not need any upkeep later. Everyday hackers are finding vulnerabilities, which is why keeping an updated, tightknit system is essential.

Another part of our hosting program is that we handle the updates. Not only do we update your WordPress installation and plugins, we test beforehand to make sure these will not cause issues with your website by doing updates in a staging environment before going live.

Once testing has been completed in the staging environment we will launch the updates to the live site. It is common for plugins conflict with each other after an update, which is why it is important to stay on top of these changes.

Does Hosting Have an Effect on How your Website Performs?

The simple answer is yes! Good hosting is very important when it comes to the performance of your website. For example, speed of any website is key to keeping viewers on your site for a longer period of time. The last thing anyone wants is to do is wait for pages to load.

It is crucial each and every page on your website is performing at its highest potential. This is also why it is important to keep everything up to date. When updates are missed it can cause major security concerns and cause your website to slow down.

Another thing we include in our Website Essentials program is we provide tools that will cache content on the browser. This means when you have a visitor come back onto your website for a second, third, fourth time, there are certain files on the site that were saved and can load right from the cache.

This means that the performance of your site with continue to be quicker each time they come back. We also offer a content delivery network, which mean we have servers all across the world. No matter where someone is in the world, your site speed will about be performing at its highest level because they will be receiving information from the nearest server.

Is Switching Hosting Providers Difficult?

It does not need to be difficult to switch hosting providers. At Onsharp we are very experienced helping each of our customers transfer the hosting of their website.

We assist in gathering your domain name registration, figuring out who is currently hosting their site, how to get access to files. We will communicate with the current vendor, coordinate, and ensure the hosting gets transferred to us.