Which web-hosting options should you choose for your new website?
In this age of websites for everyone and everything, the least thought of decision that needs to be made is, where do I host my website?
This decision needs to be made before you start your website development, and, before you make the decision as to build your website yourself, or hire a web developer.
There are basically two directions to take when contemplating the creation of a new website, or the revamp of an existing site.
You can have your website created by a web developer, and then self-hosted with a web hosting company, or you can build your website yourself, and have the hosting taken care of by the same company.
Self Hosting:
If you’re going to hire a web developer to build your site, they’ll tend to use either WordPress or Joomla, depending on your requirements.
Shopping carts, Social Media connections, online booking systems etc can all be incorporated into a Joomla/Wordpress website.
If you take this route, your web developer usually has a favourite Web Hosting company (or their own) that they’ll organise and get your site setup on.
Under this web hosting environment, you have total control. You can fine tune your website, or at least your web developer can. You can speed things up, block bots and spam and have full control over multiple domain names and sub-domains. Usually with no limits.
Let’s say you have 3 or 4 domain names, all similar (.com, .net, .com.au etc) and you wish all your domain names to point to your one, single website. This is an easy task when you’re dealing with your own web hosting company. You have full creative control.
Costs for a basic web hosting account for one website ranges from $100 – $300 per year.
Company Hosted:
Companies such as Wix, will let you build your own website, using easy-to-use wizards. Your new website stays on the Wix servers, If the company goes bust, or has technical issues, you’ll be tied up to their limitations. Your decision to use such a service, will be balanced out by not having as much control over your web hosting and thus your website.
The wizards are easy to follow and setup. Even a shopping cart can be setup by a first time web builder.
However, if you want to customise your site, or do some serious SEO work on your site, then things become more restricted. And as for pointing other domains to your site … that’s a challenge and sometimes disallowed.
Costs for these self-made-hosted websites range from free (very limited) to $900 per year.
At Gippsland Web design, we like to have full control over all websites we create. If our clients want to point multiple domain names to their sites, or have us perform intense SEO strategies, then we like to have full control and access to the site.
Thus, we always recommend clients go with a Self Hosted Web Hosting company. Preferrably our Gippsland web hosting.
