speed matters series
Website Hosting Matters
The mired of choices with website hosting companies is overwhelming to most website owners. We are a hosting company at EngineX Design (our parent company) because we like to control all variables when creating and managing websites for customers.
In this blog we’ll review what we consider the best overall technology your hosting company should have. Of course this opinion and there are other very fast options but from our experience we believe VPS is the optimal path for most and Dedicated for high traffic customers.
I am going to be as brief as possible here because if you’re serious there is only one option here: VPS or Dedicated Server.
Bargain “Shared” Hosting: This translates to your website sharing the same memory/resource space of a server with about 50-100 other website customers. One moment your website will fly and load instantly than 5 minutes later it will crawl and flop around. It’s incredibly cheap. That’s about all I can say positive.
VPS – Virtual Private Server – This option dedicates a virtual server space for your website isolating it from being negatively affected by other website customers. It’s memory space is protected and the servers CPUs allocate a protected block of resources as well. You generally have two flavors of VPS:
- Managed – Managed VPS’s average around $39 – $59 a month with reputable companies and everything but the most basic stuff such as website installs / website management are taken care of. No need to understand NGINX or APACHE or PHP or .conf files or any server related technologies.
- Unmanaged – If you are reading this then this probably isn’t something that you’ll want to consider at the moment. Unmanaged means you are responsible for everything including server setup and all related server technologies. The advantages are a low cost of about $39 a month will get you an overpowered faster site and you can tweak the server config for even more speed.
Dedicated Server – This option takes you to the highest performing most protected option and is necessary for high traffic websites. Everything is dedicated to your website so there is no need for “virtualization” of server resources. With this option you have two flavors:
- Managed – Just like VPS Managed everything server related is taken care of for you
- Bare Metal – Identical to Unmanaged VPS except you control an entire server vs a virtual server.
To summarize: If you’re serious about your website than a VPS or Dedicated option is the only choice – managed or unmanaged.
Coming in our next installment of “Speed Matters” we will cover performance tips for CRM based website platforms.