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Who does hosting and what’s the difference?

February 1, 2021 Ben Beach No comments

Intro

This post was inspired by a recent client who dug deep into hosting differences. I wanted to provide a bit of background on what we believe the best hosting out there is. This is based on our experience in hosting since 2004. Feel free to write your agreements or disagreements in the comments! ON TO IT!

Commercial Hosting

When you host with a commercial host, pack your website in with 40-80-200 other websites, depending on their capacity and capability. Some of them may just rent servers from someone else (i.e. purchase from company Alpha and they just turn around and buy it from Bravo keeping money on top of it). Is that a bad thing? It depends: if one of those sites becomes infected, there’s a small chance the infection could leak into your website and take it down or begin spamming emails.
Further, when hosting with a commercial host, many times you have to configure your own backups or pay for their “special” backup plan. If something happens, how long is it going to take your site to recover? Are you in control or are you waiting on the support team to fix all 3000 sites that just crashed? The big concern here is that you’re not in control over how much “downtime” you might have. One final factor, already hinted at above, is being on shared hosting, you share your “IP” address with many other websites. If one of them starts spamming email (either infected or intentionally malicious) then the IP address is added to what’s called a mail blacklist. that sends all emails from the domain to the senders’ junk mail (or may block all emails completely).
Now, there are some situations where you SHOULD go with commercial hosting:
  • You need fast, scaleable performance: I.E. you’re hosting a large application
  • You need a dedicated connection that you know nobody else can compromise
  • You need a special setup for a medium-size application

What about hosting with my web developer or local ISP?

Well, there are some benefits and drawbacks here too. Let’s be real – everyone has a life, no matter how much you want to believe that person you’re paying monthly or yearly is at your call 24/7. Your ISP will have office hours and you won’t be able to resolve issues outside of those hours (unless you have a FANTASTIC ISP).

Hosting with your developer is a little different. Most website developers do not have the capabilities to set up their own hosting servers and manage them and as a result, they typically spring to resell service to you. That is all good and fine and comes with some benefits, but you could theoretically get that service at the same price the web developer is getting. There are a few out there who are a bit different. Most of those that are different will have a team or feature hosting directly on their site. If they can’t sell you just hosting, then it’s not a good sign.

Hosting with Innovated Tech

So where does that leave us? Well, we’re actually on the far right end of the spectrum. We’ve always been a little off. Our team has the following to offer:

  • Our hosting is dedicated – we set up and manage our servers from the bare metal all the way through the final presentation
  • We control the backups, backup schedule, and provide you with a powerful interface that you can manage your hosting
  • We know every site that’s set up and maintained with us and separate the other hosting sites to a different server and IP
  • We are in direct control over the speed of a website and its capabilities – we’ve stressed our servers MANY times over the last 8 years!
  • We have alerts set up for monitoring if any email address might be (legitimately or illegitimately) sending spam emails or being flagged as spam
  • We monitor our downtime and ensure your websites will be available 99.999% of the time
  • We have a specialist in server management (he does other things too, but hey… whatever!)

Where does that leave me?

It doesn’t matter to Innovated Tech where you host, how you host, or who you host with – ultimately hosting with us is a moderate convenience at best. Can we guarantee more than the big guys on the block? Maybe not, but the goal is to provide our customers with options and information. We’ll work with whomever you pick!

Ben BeachWho does hosting and what’s the difference?

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