Website Maintenance - 3 Feb 2023

Website Wanted: Everything You Need to Know About Website Hosting and Maintenance

Is a new website on your radar? There’s never been a better time to join the bustling online community. The average Canadian now spends over six hours per day online, doing everything from shopping for a new vacuum cleaner or reading up on local attractions to sharing YouTube videos and scrolling TikTok. We’re sure there are probably a few work emails scattered somewhere there, too.

Websites are not only essential for online businesses, but they also play a crucial role in drawing attention to retail outlets and service providers. 81% of consumers will shop and compare businesses online before making an in-person purchase. If this is your first foray into building a website, you may feel just a little overwhelmed with the sheer amount of developer jargon floating around on the internet, especially when it comes to actual website infrastructure. This article will help clarify two of the most important aspects of your new website: website hosting and website maintenance.

What is Website Hosting?

One of the first things you need to get a website off the ground is somewhere to host it.

To open a retail outlet, you need a location. Similarly, to exist on the internet, your website needs to live somewhere customers can visit. And that somewhere is on a server. But setting up your web server is a huge undertaking; it requires space, technology, and highly skilled employees to operate and manage. That’s why most small and medium-sized businesses rent space through third-party hosting services.

Third-party website hosting provides the space for your website to live, with varying degrees of autonomy. Here’s how it works.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the least expensive way to set up your website. Rather than a dedicated server, your website will share the space – and the expense with other small businesses. As a bonus, these companies generally manage all the technical aspects of maintaining and updating the server; shared server space is a one-stop shop for people with little time or technical knowledge.

However, there are a few potential drawbacks to a shared hosting situation. Firstly, there is the risk that spikes in traffic to a neighbouring website could affect your site’s performance. Not an issue for low-traffic websites but could pose a problem for busy e-commerce shops. Secondly, when hosting on a shared server, you rely on that host’s web security. This usually is fine for most businesses using a reliable hosting provider but could be a concern for companies regularly handling sensitive client information.

Finally, shared hosting may limit the amount of customization allowed, and if you go over your allocated space, your website could be removed from the server.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

Businesses needing more power and control over their web hosting can opt for VPS hosting. While you are technically sharing space on a server with other websites, VPS hosting provides your website with dedicated space and resources.

Reserved space on a shared server comes with an array of benefits. VPS hosting is still less costly than dedicated hosting but offers more storage space and greater freedom to customize your website and security requirements than shared hosting.

However, VPS hosting is not a perfect solution, especially for businesses anticipating their traffic and storage needs to dramatically increase shortly and even the added capacity has limitations in a shared environment. More control over your server may also mean that you need someone on your team with the technical expertise to manage your server, a cost small business will need to consider carefully.

Dedicated Server

When you want it all and have the budget and technical expertise to support it, a dedicated server might be what you’re after. Typically reserved for large, complex websites with millions of daily visitors, dedicated servers offer complete control over software customizations and security upgrades. As you can imagine, hosting your website on a dedicated server is the priciest hosting option. However, a dedicated server can be viewed as a worthwhile investment for businesses with strict security, performance, and customization needs.

What’s a Domain?

Continuing with the storefront analogy, once you have a location (host), you must provide visitors with an address. Online, this is your domain name, and this name can be anything you choose – provided the domain is available. Don’t forget domain names need to be renewed annually to remain active, so mark your calendar because letting yours expire could have costly consequences.

The good news is that since web hosting and domain names are so closely connected, most hosting providers offer both services.

Now You’re Ready… To Maintain Your Website

Launching a shiny new website is exciting, and you might feel like the hard part is done. However, to keep your brand-new website secure, looking great, and performing optimally, you must undertake regular maintenance tasks.

Website maintenance is akin to the kinds of regular cleaning, decluttering, and updating you would perform to keep a retail outlet in order and customers coming back for more – only this maintenance is digital. Standard website maintenance tasks include:

• Keeping website software, themes, and plugins up to date
• Keeping backend technology updated
• Performing regular website backups
• Editing and publishing new content
• Checking website security and reporting
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) renewal
• Testing website speed
• Finding and fixing dead links and errors
• Monitoring performance and website analytics
• Performing regular SEO audits

What’s most important is that these maintenance tasks need to be performed regularly, not when you start having problems. Some maintenance tasks like backing up files should be performed weekly, while others, like updating and publishing new content, can be taken care of monthly. Monitoring security and updating software and plugins are ongoing tasks that need to be managed continuously.

If you were to launch your website and forget about it, you’d eventually begin noticing performance-related issues creeping up. Issues like slow-loading pages, plugins that no longer function correctly, and broken links are not only bad news for your website, but these problems will also impact user experience, which is bad for business. And if that wasn’t enough, you also leave your website vulnerable to potential security threats. Small businesses are some of the highest-value targets for hackers because these websites often lack the security protocols of larger companies.

Ultimately, protecting your customers and your brand with proactive website maintenance is far less costly than dealing with the consequences of a security breach or rebuilding a website.

Professional Website Hosting and Maintenance: A Better Way to Website

If hosting and maintaining a website sounds like a lot of work, you would be right. But the good news is there are entire agencies dedicated to doing just that.

Professional website hosting and maintenance agencies take all the time and guesswork out of keeping your website running at peak performance, leaving you free to focus on other crucial aspects of running a successful business. And with various customizable fully-managed plans, you can pick and choose the services that satisfy your business needs and budget.

Are you looking for a helping hand? Nirvana Canada provides a range of professionally managed website hosting and maintenance plans to businesses of all sizes. We take pride in providing reliable and transparent website hosting and maintenance services tailored to meet each client’s unique situation. We’ll never recommend services you don’t need, and all recommendations will come with a clear, jargon-free explanation; we want you to feel confident in your choice because we believe our history of exemplary service stands for itself.

So, whether you are looking to build a new site, build a first site, or migrate an existing one, get in touch today and let us show you why the Nirvana Canada team is the right website hosting and maintenance provider for your business.