Web Hosting And Web Design
Many small business owners spend so much time worried about web design concerns they often forget about the importance of web hosting. That’s a fatal mistake and it could cost you.
It’s not that web design isn’t important. It’s very important, but let’s draw an analogy. Should you design a nice big and beautiful house and start building it before you’ve bought the real estate to put it on? What if you design a house that requires a half acre lot, but you’ve bought a 1/4-acre lot instead? See the problem?
With web design, your problems can often be just as bad. Design your website and choose the wrong hosting for it and it can hurt you in the long run. You could have frequent service outings that take your website off line for periods of time and frustrate your customers. Or you could see your website getting hacked often because of lax security. All because you chose the wrong hosting company and the wrong hosting service.
When you are in the planning stage of your website, consult your web design company for their recommendations on web hosts. You could save yourself a lot of headache down the road by picking the right hosting company to begin with.
How Host Selection Affects Your Web Design Needs
When it comes to world-class web design, there is more to building a good web site than looking pretty. The elements are complicated, but how they work together makes all the difference. And there’s not just one right way to do it either.
One of the least often thought about aspects of web design is hosting. Sure, everyone thinks about it, of course. They choose a host and build a website and upload it to their host’s servers. But few webmasters actually sit and think about the hosting needs of their website. But the features of your web host are just as important for web design as they are anything else.
For starters, do you need a dedicated host or will a shared hosting plan suit your needs? To be sure, a dedicated server is more secure. It’s also more costly.
Then there’s the database support. Do you need a Windows server or a Linux server? Do you know the difference?
What about special needs for e-commerce accommodation or huge file storage such as videos and audio files? Are those necessary in your business plan?
It will behoove you to research the web hosting options you have available to you and compare them with your web design needs before you purchase your domain name and select a host. While you can always move to another host and repoint your DNS servers to that new host, you don’t want to do that if you can avoid it. It’s best to start out in your permanent home.