Business Times of Edmond, Oklahoma January 2020 - Page 30

BUSINESS MATTERS
TIM PRIEBE
W ebifiable
How Does Website Hosting Work?
I
f you’ve ever been involved in the
building of a website, part of what
you pay for — likely on an ongoing
basis — is website hosting. If you’ve ever
wondered what all is included with website
hosting, you’re not alone. A couple times
a year someone who isn’t a client of mine
will ask me if they really need to be paying
anyone for website hosting.
The short answer? Yes, you need website
hosting if you want your website to be
online.
So what is website hosting? When
someone builds a website for you, it has to
be online somewhere. A website is just a
bunch of files. While you could store those
on a USB thumb drive, they won’t do you
any good unless other people can access
them. So you put them on a web server
that’s set up to host websites.
In practice, there are a number of
different ways that can work.
In the traditional model that was
essentially the only one around when I
made my first website back in 1996, you
paid someone to develop a website for you,
then you paid monthly or yearly for website
hosting. In that website hosting model,
you’re just paying for the space on the hard
drive. Yes, the company you pay will keep
their server’s operating system up-to-date.
But they won’t touch your actual website.
Over time, some companies developed
proprietary systems to run your website.
These content management systems — or
CMSs — remained proprietary because
the company that built your website also
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January 2020 | The Business Times
required you to host with them. And if
you decided you didn’t want to work with
them any longer, you most likely lost your
website.
Other options like Wix and Squarespace
came onto the scene eventually. Those types
of services have you — or someone you pay
— use their proprietary tools to build your
website. The plus side is that you aren’t tied
to the specific person or company who built
your site, but you are tied to the hosting of
Wix, Squarespace, or whatever the service is
they used to build your site.
The option that I usually — but not
always — recommend for business and
nonprofits is an open source platform like
WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. You can
still build the site on your own or hire a
professional to help you get better results.
But once the site is built, you’re not tied
down to one company to help with it or to
host it.
Yes, you have to pay someone to host
it, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the
company that built it.
Open source systems like WordPress,
Joomla or Drupal also give you far more
power over the capabilities of your website.
Not everyone needs that much power, but if
you do they can be a great choice.
Of course, with that power comes more
responsibility. Those types of system are
far more likely to break. And while the
traditional model of hosting can work for
those systems, that means you’re on your
own when it comes to fixing any issues.
Enter a newer model of hosting,
managed hosting. Simply put, managed
hosting does everything that is included in
traditional hosting, plus they help support
those more powerful website systems.
Usually managed hosting includes
keeping your software backed up, up-to-date,
and free of conflicts. It may also include
helping you update the actual content on
the website.
The price range of all these hosting
options can vary greatly. Traditional hosting
is often less than $10 a month, while
managed hosting can easily be 10 times that
amount.
Which is the best hosting option?
It really depends. If you use a digital
marketing expert, there’s a decent chance
they’ll be using one of the open source
systems that are more powerful. In that
case, traditional hosting could cause you
headaches over time. Managed hosting
would require more of a monetary
investment, but would cause less actual
problems and stress over time.
TIM PRIEBE is an online marketer, a public
speaker, the author of several books and many
articles, a Christian, a painter, a Superman
fan, a Star Trek geek, a father to three boys,
and a husband to one wife. He has run T&S
Online Marketing since 2003, helping business
and nonprofits with their digital marketing.
He can be reached at [e-mail] or
405-285-0348. For more information visit
tandsgo.com.