Understanding Hosting Environments
Website hosting is how your business shares its website content with browsers—and the hosting environment that you choose enables your website to be accessible on the internet. The selection of your hosting server can offer access to other benefits, including security and support.
While there are a number of hosting options, two primary options are:
- Shared hosting
- Virtual private server (VPS) hosting
Shared hosting involves sharing a server and its resources with other websites. While this is the most affordable option, it’s primarily ideal for websites with lower traffic levels or minimal ongoing content changes.
Conversely, a VPS imitates a dedicated server within a shared hosting environment, so your website has significantly more resources available to it. While this option is more expensive, it provides numerous features and benefits to companies—especially to those looking to grow their digital footprint. Businesses that have a higher volume of website traffic regularly should look to invest in a VPS, as it typically offers more customization and better performance than shared hosting.
Understanding your businesses’ goals, including where it hopes to take its website presence, is key in selecting the right hosting environment. Read on to discover which features are most important when choosing a hosting environment—and why investing in managed hosting can support long-term growth and security of your brand’s website.
Features of Hosting Environments
An effective hosting environment can offer businesses a variety of benefits, but four of the most important features to prioritize are:
Security
Your website’s security—and the security of your website’s visitors—is of the utmost importance. The hosting environment you select should include consistent monitoring for unusual or unauthorized activity, as well as powerful firewalls. You’ll also want to ensure that the hosting environment provides a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate, which creates another level of security and encryption for transferring sensitive data.
Speed
47 percent of consumers expect a website page to load in two seconds or less, making speed an integral consideration. While website speed is impacted by a variety of factors, the hosting environment does play a role in this. You’ll want to ensure you select one that has the functionality, speed and memory needed to support a faster website load time.
Scalability
Choosing a website hosting environment that can grow with your business’ website is key. Understanding your business goals from the start can assist with this portion of the decision making, as you’ll know what you intend to need in the short- and long-term.
Price
It may seem appealing to find the lowest cost option for your website hosting; however, this could lead to limitations in performance and functionality. Make sure to research an option that aligns with your business’ budget while still providing the needed features to keep your website performance and growth strong.
Beyond selecting the right hosting environment, though, you’ll also want to find the right partner to look after your website—specifically one who offers managed hosting.
Investing in Managed Hosting
Servers need consistent maintenance, including security updates and new configurations. Investing in managed hosting helps ensure that the server stays updated, keeping your website functioning to the highest level.
When combined with a website security plan, it can also keep the websites on the server updated—guaranteeing that security and core maintenance updates are constantly performed.
For example, the Drupal Security Team has a core security release window the third Wednesday of every month. If there are security issues that are being fixed as part of a release, these updates are released to the public on this date each month. If you’ve invested in managed hosting and a website security plan, you'll have a team monitoring those releases—and implementing them into your website to ensure it is updated and safe.
Managed hosting can also include daily backups of the website’s content, as well as installation of SSL certificates for security purposes.
It’s essential to make the investment in managed website hosting, as it ensures your website is kept secure and updated.
Take the Next Step
At Concentrek, we believe in the importance of coupling strong managed website hosting with a website security plan. We are skilled in effectively supporting Drupal-built websites, including:
- Scalable storage levels
- Daily uptime monitoring
- Scheduled weekly backups
- On-demand backups
- Monthly Drupal security and core maintenance
- SSL certificate
- Nightly website backups
- Best-in-class server-level support
Get in touch with us today to see how we can assist your company in maintaining a strong and secure website.
