Having reliable, trustworthy hosting for your website is paramount to serving your website to your audience, ensuring your site is fast, reliable, and secure. Without a powerful hosting solution, your website could suffer from slow loading times, frequent downtime, or even security vulnerabilities, all of which can severely impact user experience and your business’s success.
What is a Server and Hosting?
When a visitor goes to your website, their browser sends a request to your server which will transmit the content and enable users to view your website. Hosting is the service of renting space on a server, and includes ensuring connectivity to your website, and support and maintenance of the server.
A shared server is where a single server manages and supports multiple websites and applications, with a dedicated amount of resources for each site.
Benefits of Shared Servers
Affordable
The cost of a shared server can be divided among a number of customers, meaning that the cost per customer is reduced. This is optimal for smaller businesses that want to keep costs down.
Ideal for Smaller Websites
Although shared servers work out cheaper for individual website admins, they still get access to an SSL certificate and website storage for files. This allows smaller businesses to get their website online and in front of their target audience, without costing too much and with little effort or understanding of hosting.
Scalability
Although shared servers do have limitations to how much storage space you can take, there are usually different tiers for increased bandwidth and storage available. This provides flexibility for business growth, to ensure that sites have sufficient resources.
Disadvantages of Shared Servers
Performance Issues
Websites on the same shared server can affect your website’s performance. If a fellow website experiences high traffic it could potentially make your website slower, limiting bandwidth meaning data is transferred to your users more slowly.
As a website owner, you do have some control over this – you can optimise your own performance, such as compressing images and limiting large plugins, to mitigate against slower loading times.
Risk of Compromised Website
If there is a cyber attack, such as hacking or malware, on one of the websites on your shared server, it could impact your website too. This could potentially pose a risk to customer data that is stored on your website, causing issues with data protection guidelines and your reputation.
If your website is hosted on a shared server, we would recommend that your website is kept as secure as possible, by using strong passwords, regularly updating your WordPress version and plugins, and setting up Two-Factor Authentication.
If you are a Ballyhoo client, we provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) – where we schedule and carry out updates on your website and its plugins, implementing tracking and monitoring to ensure your website is secure and to resolve any potential issues before they develop.
Restricted Storage Space
The server storage space is split across all sites on a shared server, meaning your website only has a fixed amount of storage and potentially no option to upgrade.
Why Choose Ballyhoo Hosting?
Whether you’re on a shared server or dedicated server, we handle all server maintenance and all technical aspects for you, including platform and security updates. We have all of the required safeguards in place to ensure security, taking daily file backups to protect against data loss or cyberattacks – which can be rolled back to any moment in time within the last 2 weeks – and all websites come with an SSL certificate as standard. We comply with GDPR to ensure that your and your customers’ data is protected, with a support team on hand to assist you.
Shared Server Alternative – Dedicated Hosting
There is an alternative to shared servers – having your own dedicated server. This is where a website (or even a group of websites owned by the same company) has the entire server to themselves, with the highest level of performance and security. Dedicated servers are ideal for e-commerce websites with high-traffic volumes, or sites that manage sensitive data. However, websites of any size can have a dedicated server!
We keep a close eye on our servers and have uptime monitoring functioning at all times, allowing us to quickly detect if a website is down, allowing us to deploy fixes to ensure minimal downtime for our customers.
Benefits of Dedicated Servers
Better Performance and Reliability
Having a dedicated server means that it is exclusively yours, giving you more stability and reliability compared to shared servers. You also have access to bigger bandwidth which means quicker loading times, and ensuring your website can stay online for your customers to browse at all times.
Perfect for High Traffic Sites
Dedicated servers are ideal for resource intensive applications as they have the ability to handle large amounts of traffic. You can also customise the server’s configuration for your business needs.
Better Security
As you don’t share the server with other websites, you have full control over the entire server. This means that we can install your preferred security software and firewall rules. Additionally, websites on shared servers may be at risk of security breaches if a fellow website on the same hosting encounters hackers or scammers, but a dedicated server eliminates this possibility.
Scalable
Dedicated servers can easily grow with your business to keep up with high traffic demands, as you’re not limited to a smaller section of a server like you are with shared servers.
Disadvantages of Dedicated Servers
Higher Costs
When your website or application is hosted on a dedicated server, you are paying a premium for not having to share it with other websites. The cost of hosting is not divided with others, meaning it is a more expensive option. Therefore, it may not be suited to start-ups or smaller businesses.
Migrating to a Dedicated Server
Moving from a shared server to a dedicated server is relatively easy and fuss free. We manage the entire process for you, ensuring that there is little to no downtime and guaranteeing all website files are migrated. Post migration, we do a thorough check of your website or application, to ensure that your website is running smoothly and as it should be.
If you are an existing Ballyhoo customer and would like to upgrade from a shared server to a dedicated server, please get in touch and we can arrange this for you.
