Website Hosting
If you build your own website, it seems that you may also want to host it yourself. Good for you! The video below is an overview of what's involved in hosting your website.
First, don’t let the terminology throw you. A server is just like any other computer; it will have more RAM and better communications gear, but under it all it’s still just a computer. Like any other computer it has folders and files. Instead of a file being a Word document, it's an HTML document but the idea is the same.
When you look in a server file list, it will look much the same as any list of folders on your laptop. Just be careful about deleting files, unlike your laptop, you can't drag these back out of the trash and onto your desktop. I would also recommend that you look at your website after you have been on your server to make sure everything looks the way you think it should.
At first you will be tempted to get online and look for the absolute cheapest people you can find. I have been there and I am not going back. The cost of hosting is so low to start with, why try to find the absolute bottom?
For an extra three dollars a month you can have a server with the latest software and an SSD (Solid State Drive). It will be faster and not crash every other week. But most important, when it crashes, there is a guy, and he has a name, and you have a phone number. Sending a trouble ticket to some far-flung city is less fun than it sounds. This is absolutly a case of save a penny, lose a Pound (£).
Try to locate a good hosting company in your target market. For example, say you have a beach front bar in the Caribbean but most or your customers are Americans. Host your website in America, not on your Island. I have worked with clients who have placed their websites at the wrong end of a very long, slow pipe.
Everybody wants to talk about up-time but you are more interested in speed. A server with a solid state drive is much faster than the same server with a hard drive. Why do you care? Because after two-seconds, website visitors start to leave and you will lose 40% of them with each additional two-seconds of wait. Hello? I said 40%!!! There is no point in building a fast website if you plan to save two dollars by sticking it on a slow server. Google Developers has a tool that will measure website speed.
A fair amount of the Lecture video is spent on cPanel. That’s the software that drives the great majority of servers. cPanel often includes a software package called Softaculous. This is a set of perhaps twenty-five applications that offer one-click installation on your server. Now you can add several cool new features to your website with just a few minutes work.
I also tell you which hosting company I use. Disclosure: I receive no compensation in any form for the recommendation.
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