How Hosting Can Level Up Your Business

Take your business to next level.

Background information
Running a successful online enterprise involves more than just product
development, marketing, and customer service. It’s also critical that your website
provide a solid foundation for both running and scaling your business. You are not
an expert in web hosting, and you probably don’t have an engineer to optimize your
server or fight off cyber-attacks. Tending the back-end of your site requires time and
technical expertise. Hosting can manage your site’s uptime, security,
performance…and more.

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What is Hosting?
• Hosting is a web hosting solution tailor-made and optimized specifically for
WordPress sites. It ensures your site always runs smoothly. It’s like having your
own personal tech team, removing the need to manage your site in-house.
• It’s also a significant step up from those budget-minded shared and do-it-
yourself VPS hosting options that require considerable technical expertise.
Here’s how hosting services compare against these online presence options for
where your site lives:

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

Shared Hosting
• Shared hosting is a popular option for businesses just starting out online. When you
sign up for a shared hosting service like GoDaddy or HostGator, your site goes onto a
server along with hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites. This means you’ll
share space on the server with every other customer. And you’ll share resources
critical to your site’s responsiveness, including CPU time, memory, and disk space.
• The best way to describe shared hosting is that it’s like living in an apartment
building. Each resident has their own apartment, but everyone shares things like the
hallways, elevators, stairwells and garbage collection.
• Shared hosting is the most economical option for new businesses, with some hosting
companies charging as little as $2.95 a month. But you get what you pay for. What
does that mean for your business? It means your hosting package will come with
strict limitations on server space and bandwidth. Shared hosting usually doesn’t
guarantee security and it’s nearly impossible to scale.
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 VPS Hosting
• VPS hosting, or Virtual Private Server hosting, is like shared hosting because your site
shares a server with other sites. However, there are fewer sites on the same server
compared to the shared hosting option. The server is also partitioned into different
virtualized server environments. Unlike shared hosting, WordPress VPS Hosting usually
provides baseline guaranteed resources. You also get additional resources at a
moment’s notice should your site experience a spike in traffic.
• VPS hosting is like living in a condo. While you share the same building with others, you
are typically responsible for the maintenance of your property and any repairs inside
your unit. Plus, there are fewer residents overall and the walls are thicker between
living spaces.
• This type of hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, with prices ranging from
$20 to $100 per month depending on the web host you choose. For that increased fee,
you’ll enjoy a website that is scalable, faster, and more secure. With this option,
however, you often have to take care of all the technical aspects of managing your site
MBA-740 Web Design and Development
yourself or hire someone who can do it for you.
Hosting
• Hosting that is designed specifically to handle WordPress. In other words, it provides
optimal technology to support WordPress websites. Partnering with a host company
takes care of all the technical aspects of hosting for you – including security,
performance, and other factors.
• Is particularly well-suited to large and enterprise-level businesses due to its superior
security and high performance. Is like living in a single-family house on a large
property. You never have to share your home with anyone else, and you have cooks,
gardeners, and other staff on hand to ensure that your property is always perfectly
maintained. Plus, your home always contains the latest devices to take full
advantage of the internet of things.

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Hosting
• Prices can vary, with plans ranging from $25 to $2,000 per month depending on
the hosting company you choose (Pagely 2019). Businesses invest in this
because they understand that the benefits of the service far outweigh its costs.
These enterprises save time and money because they never have to pay for
dedicated engineers to manage their sites. Partnering with an experienced host
also improves site performance, further bolstering the bottom line.
• You will need to find a host that has maintained its place as a hosting market
leader in innovation, speed, scalability, and security.

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The Advantages of hosting
• It’s not unusual for small businesses to start with shared hosting. Similarly, many
large enterprise businesses opt for VPS hosting. While both options are decent
choices for WordPress sites, there are some fundamental benefits only hosts can
deliver.
• 1. High Availability and Uptime
• Site availability and server uptime are crucial for any online business. When your site
generates 100 percent of business revenue, any unexpected downtime means lost
sales and lost productivity. Also, it can damage your brand’s reputation and
negatively impact your site’s visibility to search engines (also known as Search
Engine Optimization).

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

The Advantages of hosting
• Typically, web hosts guarantee 99% uptime. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you’ll
actually get 99% uptime (Pagely 2019). But when you partner with a host, even
with an entry-level account, you’ll receive a vastly superior level of uptime and
availability, regardless of hardware failure, the weather, power outages, or even
disgruntled IT staff.
• For example, to ensure maximum uptime, some host provide two different layers
of uptime monitoring. If anything is detected that could translate to downtime, the
entire support team is notified. In the vast majority of cases, they identify issues
and fix them before downtime can occur, so issues are corrected before customers
are even aware of them.
• They also receive proactive notifications if you get close to your resource limits, and
run tests after updates to check that all sites are still up. If a problem from a plugin
update is found, they automatically rolls back the update.
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The Advantages of hosting
• For enterprise websites that need maximum uptime, it might be best to choose
a host that provides high-availability architecture that spreads the workload
over two or more servers in different zones. This approach reduces the risk of
an outage during maintenance events, unforeseen outages, or traffic spikes.
• When you start a live chat or speak to customer support by phone about an
issue with your website, you want to talk to someone who can solve your
problem immediately. Shared and VPS hosts may offer more affordable services
but when you run into an issue such as an attack on your site or unreliable
uptime, it could take several days of emailing back and forth just to get your
service provider to investigate the issue. Meanwhile, you could be losing
thousands of dollars in sales.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

The Advantages of hosting
• Expert technical support starts with the people manning the support lines. Look
for a host that employs a passionate and exceptionally skilled group of
engineers who know how to apply technology to solve big problems.
• Inquire about things like level-one phone operators reading a script, some
hosting companies pass you off to operators like that, others don’t (think about
which you prefer). It’s best to speak immediately with bona fide engineers to
help you manage your site and solve your problem the first time.

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3. A Modern High-Performance
Hosting Stack
• A reputable and experienced hosting company invests in their technology. They
use a modern hosting stack and fine-tune it to handle the demands of
WordPress, providing their clients with unparalleled speed and performance.
• Some superior stacks, are built on Amazon Web Services. This allows the
customer to leverage a nearly infinite amount of resources and advanced
tooling. These resources and tools allow your host to support and scale
WordPress applications as necessary. Using load-balanced clusters from a pair
of nodes to a cluster of 10+ machines, you’ll get the same fully WordPress
experience across a robust, scalable stack. This allows your host to carry
massive amounts of web traffic without sacrificing performance. And it does
this all while providing developer flexibility that other hosting solutions don’t
offer.

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3. A Modern High-Performance
Hosting Stack
• What you’re looking for are the fastest, most flexible hosting environments
through things like routing, intelligent caching/acceleration, security, and
configuration flexibility.
• Along with technologies like PHP7, HTTP/2, and SSL management, the use
of proprietary NGINX/OpenResty HyperProxies would make your life easier.
It delivers unmatched speed and Redis to further accelerate the WordPress
experience. The following is the suite of other in-house services and a great
example of the type of stack you should inquire about when shopping
around with different hosts. If for nothing else, consider this a point to
reference for comparison sake:

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3. A Modern High-Performance
Hosting Stack
• PressDNS: Premium DNS powered with Amazon’s route 53 service that takes
advantage of geo-balancing and geo-routing
• PressCACHE: A global WordPress acceleration system that works much like a CDN,
but is specifically designed to cache and serve WordPress page output
• PressARMOR: Security architecture, including a web application firewall, malware
scanning, chroot user separation, and network edge rulesets
• PressTHUMB: On-demand image optimization and thumbnail creation
• PressFORMANCE: Performance monitoring analytics and assessments

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4. Updates
• A hosting plan provides an easy way to update the core WordPress application
and needed plugins. Keeping the software that powers your site up-to-date is
critical for the security, performance, and compatibility of your site.
• A good host may run auto-updates for you. But an expert host will keep your
software up-to-date and actively monitor how updates impact your site through
tasks like automated tests to make sure your site is still running smoothly after
every update.

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5. Security
• Shared hosting packages typically don’t offer any assistance if
your site falls victim to a cyber attack or if you encounter malware
problems. Secure WordPress hosting is perhaps the biggest
incentive to take into consideration. When you partner with a
host, routine software updates and a specialized hosting
environment mean your site is better guarded against hackers,
bots, and other security concerns. And you can expect regular
security checks and malware removal.
• A good hosting reputation will prove outstanding security for its
clients. If a host can boast that they’ve experienced a single
serious security incident, you’re in good hands. A robust suite of
security services is a comprehensive security architecture that
hardens and protects a network, hardware, and WordPress
applications with a focus on prevention and the mitigation of risk
to clients.
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5. Security
• For base level security, your host should use a dynamic web application firewall
(WAF) that blocks code injection attacks, known exploits, and rate limits access
attempts. This greatly reduces the success of a distributed denial of service
attack or a brute force attack. They should also practice real-time system
malware scanning, constantly looking for things like trojan horses, viruses,
worms, keyloggers, spyware, and adware.

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6. Premium DNS
• The Domain Name System (DNS) is, essentially, the phone book of the internet.
When you enter a domain name like google.com into a web browser, the
browser uses DNS to translate the domain name into an Internet Protocol (IP)
address, which tells the browser where to get the desired webpage.
• When you’ve invested so much in your site, you don’t ever want your domain
names to go offline. This is why investing in a premium DNS provider is a must.
But typical shared or VPS hosting packages, and even most hosts, don’t offer
premium DNS. However, there are options where you’ll enjoy the benefits of a
DNS system backed by Amazon’s Route53 service. This service answers DNS
queries faster by using a global network of DNS servers.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

7. Developer-Friendly Tools
• If your team wants to be hands-on with your server environment, a host should
provide developer-friendly tools that you’re unlikely to get with most shared
hosting plans. You should get tools like SSH, staging, GIT and WP-CLI, in addition
to basics like SFTP, database access, and error/access logs. In addition, you
should also receive support for customer PHP extensions including New Relic,
system crontab access, and more.
• If it’s important to you, look for integration with the WordPress REST API. A
Partner API would be useful for customers who want to integrate their host into
their workflows to quickly spin up new sites under their hosting account.
• The ability to quickly clone your live site and test your changes is hugely
beneficial so you can also push updates back to your production site using your
own workflows.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

8. Scalability
• WordPress scalability, the ability to quickly handle and
adapt to sudden changes, is critical for any online
enterprise. If a celebrity endorsement drives more
customers to your site, the unexpected increase in traffic
will require more resources.
• As your business grows and your site gains more
traction, you’ll require additional website resources to
keep things running smoothly. You’ll also to need to be
able to collect customer data efficiently. If you haven’t
equipped your site to scale fluidly, it could crash. And
any unexpected downtime could lead to lost sales and
damage to your brand reputation.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

8. Scalability
• Choosing the right hosting plan can help safeguard your business against this
kind of catastrophe. Strongly consider choosing a market leader in providing
scalable solutions for WordPress. We recommend choosing a host who has built
its hosting stack and solutions-oriented services specifically to address the
complex scaling, security, and performance needs of the world’s biggest brands.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

9. Global Reach
• Small businesses using shared or VPS hosting typically use caching plugins and
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize page speed. This provides faster
loading times for international visitors. Hosting should take care of all that for you.
• For example, PressCACHE technology is a global WordPress acceleration system. It
works much like a CDN, but was designed specifically for WordPress page output. It
handles the server-level caching of your site content to speed up the delivery of your
pages. All you need to do is turn it on, then sit back and enjoy the speed.
• PressCACHE is also responsible for globally serving your content from one of
Amazon’s data centers in the United States, Asia, and Europe. It routes the requests
for your website to the global Point of Presence (PoPs) servers closest to the user.
This shortens the distance between visitors and your website, speeding the load time
of your site to a global audience.

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Hosting is Critical for
High-Demand Websites
• Hosting is essential when flexibility, scalability, and support are paramount. If
your business doesn’t have the in-house capability to manage all aspects of
your site’s security, performance, and more, hosting is an ideal solution.
• Ultimately, it’s about making the right choice for your business. Make sure you
find the best tools for your business to succeed online.

MBA-740 Web Design and Development

References
1. P. Pollock (2013), “Web Hosting For Dummies” 1st Edition, United States, John
Wiley, CHAPTER 2.
2. https://firstsiteguide.com/fsg_web_hosting.pdf
3. https://pagely.com/blog/managed-wordpress-hosting/

MBA-740 Web Design and Development