Abbie Thoms, founder of the award winning Polyspiral Graphic Design, explains what hosting is all about and what you need to look out for.
Website hosting is where your website files live. A website is made of website files like .php or .htm for example plus any images or documents you’ve uploaded to your website and where all your website data will be kept. You need a special computer called a server to host your website, so this ‘serves’ your website to internet users around the world. It’s important to get the right hosting for your website as it can affect your website's security, determine how many people can get on your website and therefor your reach and your businesses reputation.
It’s all about being found, and your website’s hosting plays a big part in Google’s listings. Google wants to serve its users as best it can. It has a secret algorithm but what you can do is: have a fast website, be mobile compatible and have an SSL certificate. These features are explained in a bit more depth below and are what you need for a successful online presence.
You’ve probably had a notification on your phone that updates need to be run and apps need updating. If you’ve ever wondered why doesn’t it all just stay the same the reason is twofold: one is that technology is always improving, the second and most important is that security holes get found by hackers, some of these are organisations with real agendas, some are just individuals with nothing better to do than ruin someone’s day. As technology evolves so do the hackers.
It’s a bit like an arms race that you always have to keep up to date with, or your device could stop working and personal data can get stolen.
Your WordPress website is the same. There is a worldwide army out there working on making WordPress and it’s plugins secure, and those updates are free! Failing to run the security updates on your website could leave your it open to getting hacked, or even worse a contact form can be hijacked. sending out masses of spam. If your mail server gets reported as sending spam to BT for example, your mailserver will be blacklisted and that can affect the other customers of your hosting company, which would stop their email to. So to prevent this, the hosting providers detect spam is being sent out and stop your email before it becomes a huge problem for them. This has the dia consequence of your website and email being out of action. Email is an important part of any businesses’ communication so losing email could mean losing business. Keeping your website security up to date is therefore a must if you don’t want to get caught out.
As you know your website is made up of a collection of files, your database and images and other documents you’ve uploaded and these change as your website is updated.
In the unlikely event the server goes down you may need to resurrect your website on another server or hosting company, or go back to an older version if an issue can’t be solved.
Our backups run daily and are kept locally in several secure locations.
For UK citizens data should be stored within the UK to adhere to the UK Data protection Act.
What is this strange term? No it’s nothing to do with losing weight. It is to do with how much data we can fit through the pipe. You need to have enough space so that even at peak times people can get onto your website. It’s a bit like having a limit on how many people you can fit through the door of your office or shop.
We allow 50GB+ bandwidth on our website hosting which can be increased if our customers need it.
Google are now penalising sites that don’t start with https. So what’s it all about? SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it used to only be necessary for websites with ecommerce and using credit card encryption or where the details sent across a connection such as website user to website needed to be kept secure.
Now Google is enforcing this on all websites it lists, even those where no confidential or sensitive data is shared from the user to the server. It makes sense for website users, their experience on your website will be all the more secure, especially if they fill out a website form, that data will be encoded and can’t be intercepted by a third party and used.
So Google are making the internet more secure by listing websites whose URL starts with https… above those without, so it’s well worth getting an SSL certificate.
SSL certificates comes as standard with all our websites.
You obviously don’t want a really slow website for your users sanity, and they’ll probably go elsewhere if they have to wait too long. Again though, a fast website will rank more highly in Google’s listings. You can test how fast your website is here https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights. There are things you go do to speed up your website - smaller images, less code etc. But it ultimately boils down to your hosting provider
It’s as bad as it sounds. A denial of service attack is where a person or a program repeatedly requests a website either by refreshing a page or a form. This takes up the website’s bandwidth and if done on a large enough scale will slow down a website or even take down the website entirely.
Our hosting means we can prevent or stop this from happening by blocking the IP address and countries if need be. Keeping our websites running smoothly and securely.
By having a strong foundation to run it on, secure, fast and stable!
For more on our website hosting see polyspiral.com/hosting
