When Just “Web Hosting” Isn’t Good Enough

Pure web hosting services are dime a dozen. Provided a host fulfills some basic requirements like having DNS tools and hosting space, you can get your website online on any one of them. And for many, it’s a race to the bottom to see who can get away with making it as cheap as possible!

But just because you have web hosting, doesn’t mean it’s good web hosting. And beyond that, there are value-added services that ensure that your site remains available, healthy, and fast. These additional services cost money and will raise the price of your hosting plan – there’s no getting around that. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of these additional services, and how you should be using them in one way or another.

Backups

This is something you’ll want to integrate into your web hosting in one way or another. Cheap web hosts will skimp on this, and so you’re left with nothing when one day your site inevitably crashes due to a failed plugin update, a malware attack, or something else. As a result, you’re forced to purchase a separate backup solution from a 3rd party, and that will end up increasing the total cost of ownership of your site.

Good web hosts will automatically take backups of your site and allow you to restore them through the administration interface. Not just that, they would also ideally store these backups in a remote location offsite so that if the main server network is compromised, the backup is still safe.

NameHero is the only host to store your backups offsite by default. Even more expensive hosting services don’t do this.

Server Caching

Your website is unlikely to be comprised of static pages. Instead, each page is generated from a database that is queried each time a visitor arrives. This places a certain static load on your server that increases linearly with the number of visitors. It means that if you have a sudden spike of traffic, your site’s performance will suffer.

Caching is a way of ameliorating this. The system stores copies (caches) of pages on the disk, and instead of recreating the page each time, it serves a copy of an already created page to the visitor. This dramatically improves performance.

However, very few web hosts offer server caching – instead, forcing website owners to implement their own caching solutions via plugins. The latter is an inferior alternative that’s not as fast as if the server were to perform the caching by itself.

NameHero uses the LiteSpeed web server that has native caching support that’s better than using ordinary plugins. This is another great value add for any website.

Malware Scanning

You should constantly be on the lookout for whether or not your site has been compromised in some way. Hacks are being found for the most popular software platforms every day. Cheap web hosts don’t do this for you, and once again, you’re forced to rely upon 3rd party software, which continues to drive up your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Good web hosts like NameHero integrate this functionality into their hosting plans. Using Imunify360, NameHero scans your website in real-time and defends you from threats ranging from DDoS attacks, IP blacklist scans, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), malware injections and cleanup, and more.

Little Costs Add Up

If you just bought basic web hosting and your site starts to do well, you would need to buy these additional services in one form or another. The more valuable your site, the more you need to make sure it runs well! And when you find yourself paying for every little additional service, you’ll see that plain old “web hosting” simply isn’t enough. There’s a lot more that goes into a successful website, and you should choose a host like NameHero that supports those additional functionalities.