What you should know about website hosting
Starting a business, purchasing a domain, and then setting up a website to act as a sales platform is a complex and time consuming process. It is easy to see why, when looking at website hosting most people do not understand the benefits of choosing the right type of hosting and investing in a management package.
What is WordPress hosting?
WordPress is a widely used content management system (CMS) that enables people to create, edit and manage websites in a way that provides a good user experience and is highly functional and relevant to the business.
The majority of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. At KH Digital, WordPress is our preferred choice of platform to build your site from, as it’s a framework that offers a multitude of themes, plugins, and flexibility to continue developing your site in the future.
By having your site hosted you are eliminating the need to invest in a powerful and secure server, instead you are renting server space for your website to live on.
Why it is important to have a fast and secure WordPress hosting service
An example of how important it is to have a secure hosting system can be seen from the recent GoDaddy data breach that happened in September 2021. This was a mass breach that affected over one million of their customers and went unnoticed for nearly two months. Research into the cause for the breach has indicated that it was due to inadequate security that did not meet industry standards.
Examples of the data exposed by customers using the compromised provisioning system are:
- Email addresses
- Customer number and contact details
- WordPress Administrator Passwords
- Database usernames and passwords
GoDaddy said that they have since reset all the passwords for the affected customers. However, any of the affected sites should have full security checks as they may have become infected by malicious files. GoDaddy have only confirmed that they have reset passwords, they have not said anything about scanning for malicious scripts or removing rogue administrator accounts.
Web host and domain name registrars that often spring to mind when a person needs a website is GoDaddy. Companies such as this spend a lot of money in marketing to encourage users to buy the domain name and hosting as a complete package on their systems. They are often marketed as highly appealing as many of their customers do not actually understand the technicalities of what they are purchasing.
For example, many customers do not own their websites. They are built and hosted on GoDaddy. If something was to happen to this company or if it faced major technical issues then these customers would lose their websites. It can also be very difficult to access your own website. If you decide in the future that you want your site redesigned or would like to install new features such as a shopping cart, then your developer will have to interact with your server provider to make these changes. This can cause issues between what work can be completed and can increase how long and difficult the process becomes (which can also make changes very expensive).
What is WordPress Maintenance and why do I need it?
To keep a site performing at its best it requires monitoring and updating of plugins to retain functionality and security. Some updates happen automatically which can affect the function of the elements on your page and overall site usability.
With a WordPress maintenance and hosting service, the company you choose will oversee these updates for you and provide ongoing support to you and your website. Our support team will help keep on top of updates so that your themes, plugins, and WordPress itself is kept up to date, and should any problems arise, they can be fixed and managed.
Ongoing website maintenance takes the stress out of setting up your site and looking after its upkeep. Keeping your website up to date and secure can be very technical to understand and time consuming, particularly if you are unsure. By investing in this service, you then have time to concentrate on selling your products and creating high quality content, rather than the often complicated technical aspects of web development.
Websites are often targeted by malware and trojans so it’s important to have ways to detect and remove threats, have highly efficient security protection, and to have regular backups to help restore information and missing elements.
There are different types of hosting packages that offer different benefits, for example, managed hosting means the host will manage the operation, security and take care of your site. Whereas shared hosting stores your site on the same server as others, this tends to be less expensive but is only suited for consistently lower traffic sites.
KH Digital hosting and website maintenance solutions
Hosting is therefore a very important consideration of your web development process. It is important to be able to perform updates, upload and change content regularly and have comprehensive security systems in place.
At KH Digital, WordPress Hosting and Support is one of our specialties. We have been working with WordPress for over 10 years and offer a number of hosting and support plans. Though WordPress is our preferred platform, we still offer hosting packages for other site platforms. We understand that every site and business has different requirements, so the first thing we will do is get to know you and your business. We can then reflect our services to suit you and help you get the most out of your digital presence.
One of the main benefits of hosting your site with us is that we offer staging sites. Our website hosting and management packages that we offer come with a staging site which is a live replica of a site where any changes and developments can be implemented first before they go live to the main site. This enables us to check that the updates will not affect the site performance and ensures that all features work with the pre-existing elements.
In our website maintenance and hosting we offer a multitude of services such as:
We will also give you a monthly report of security scans, optimisations, custom work, plugin, theme and WordPress updates performed throughout the month.
If you would like any more information on hosting your site or if you would like to get started on a website maintenance package then please get in touch for a friendly chat. Our web design and development team will happily answer any questions, and can advise you on the best solutions for you. Rest assured if you decide this is something you would like there is no downtime for your site when transferring your hosting to us.
