Website Hosting & Website Maintenance
In the world of digital marketing and website design, web hosting and maintenance are often times an after thought. From a small business perspective, understanding where to host your website, email, register your domain name, and how to maintain what you’ve created; can often be as daunting a task as creating a website. Because of the technical aspect of hosting and maintenance, these services usually fall under the realm of IT rather than marketing. At The Dibraco Agency we can provide these services to you, but more importantly, we can teach you about what goes into hosting and maintenance so you can make the decisions that are right for your business.
Website Hosting For Small Business: What You Should Know
There are different pieces involved in hosting a website, many times these are all lumped into the same category. It’s important to understand what each of these pieces are, below is a brief breakdown:
- Website Hosting – In broad terms, websites are hosted on remote computers called servers. These computers are always connected to the internet and need to have enough resources and bandwidth to handle multiple people accessing your website. Shared hosting, virtual private servers, cloud servers, and dedicated servers are some of the terms you might have heard being used. If you have questions about what these are feel free to give us a call at 919-335-6924, we’ll be happy to give you a breakdown of what these terms mean. We’ll also help you determine which hosting solution is best for you.
- Domain Name Server (DNS) – Think of a domain name server as a phone book, it lists domain names and tells other computers where to find information pertaining to that domain name. A domain name is a doesn’t actually have anything to do with where your website is hosted. However, without a domain name, there’s nothing to point to your website’s host. As a best practice, businesses should own their domain name and control access to it. Any knowledgeable IT company or digital marketing agency will be more than happy to assist you with pointing your domain name to their hosting services, be wary if they want to be your registrar, you may wind up losing your domain if your partnership sours.
- Email Hosting – Usually, a company that is hosting your website can also handle your email hosting. However, these do not have to be managed by the same company. Access to email is critical in the digital age and for small businesses, choosing the right email host can be the difference between success and failure. Depending on your technical skill set, out of the box email hosting solutions from some of the larger providers, may not always be the best solution for you.
It’s important to understand that the type of server you are on can impact your page load speeds and, in turn, your search engine rank.