Almost every business in the 21st-century world has to have a robust online presence. The only way that a business could possibly survive without one is in an incredibly close-knit community. Anybody who is trying to expand his or her reach beyond the group of people they meet in person needs a great online presence. That online presence can help spread a message and a product to every continent on the planet. However, one of the biggest problems that small businesses face is actually expanding. A few of them tend to expand too quickly and can’t handle the amount of business. These companies tend to start dropping phone calls, missing appointments, and crashing their servers. Crashing servers or overloading web hosting results from having too many demands of a hosting service that is not equipped to handle your newfound success. Why does this happen?
Well, essentially, there are two kinds of server hosting services: dedicated servers and virtual servers. A virtual server is not physical, but is rather a virtual partition on a server. You, as the business, would buy a certain amount of virtual space on a server that you can do what you want. You’re not actually completely free to do whatever you want, because you still have to share the physical server with others. That limits the kind of software you can install, as well as the amount. People who don’t have very much traffic to their websites typically employ these servers; however, they’re not very useful for businesses that are expanding quickly.
A dedicated server is another kind of hosting service that involves you renting an actual physical server that is yours to do with what you want.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting, as previously expressed, is great for businesses that are trying to expand to a more robust online presence. Dedicated hosting is great because they allow you to have an entire physical server to yourself; although there are still some regulations as to what you can and cannot install on your server, you will have much more latitude for specialised programs.
Furthermore, dedicated servers offer you an extra amount of security. One of the biggest concerns you should have as a business operator is your security; there are thousands of individuals all over the world that want to exploit weaknesses in business security practices. Since you are working with a dedicated hosting service, the provider will be able to focus on your server with constant monitoring. Not all host servers come with monitoring as a standard; they expect you to fend for yourself and monitor your own servers, but if you’re busy or don’t know how to monitor your server, you could find yourself at risk for malicious actors. CWCS’ dedicated servers come with standard support monitoring, which means that a trained professional will always have an eye on your server to ensure that your business stays up and running. There is one specific kind of protection that you should look for from your hosting services—distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation.
DDoS Mitigation
DDoS is a way of overloading your server so that your business is offline. These are often attacks led by competitors, but sometimes are led by hackers who are trying to get access to your finances so they can steal your business’ money.
A denial of service attack typically works when one computer and one Internet connection start making requests of a server in the form of visiting the page, downloading items, and uploading items. The attacking computer makes so many requests that eventually the server is overwhelmed and shuts down—at this point, the attack is successful, because it has shut down your server.
A DDoS attack is similar but it does not originate from one computer and one Internet connection; instead, it originates from several different sources all at once. Oftentimes, these are infected computers without any specific person at each one; either way, they are much harder to defend against. So, any hosting service you hire should offer you DDoS mitigation, which will protect you from these malicious attacks.
Experience
Choosing a dedicated host server comes down to several different aspects; as discussed earlier, security and performance are two of the biggest considerations when choosing a dedicated host server. However, you don’t really know if a business is actually going to come through on the promises they make.
Many different hosting services might claim that they offer cutting edge DDoS mitigation or state of the art performance, but they actually don’t. Experience is one of the ways to be sure that you are getting the services that you were offered. When you are picking a hosting service, you should look for one that has at least a decade of experience. When a business has been delivering service to various customers for over a decade, you can feel fairly confident that they are delivering on their promises.
If a hosting service is not actually delivering on the promises it makes, then you can feel pretty confident they’ll start getting a bunch of bad reviews and complaints. Those reviews and complaints will eventually translate into a loss of customers. Obviously, that’s not a sustainable business model, which means that a business over a decade old is probably pretty reliable.
Conclusion
In conclusion, picking a hosting service is not easy but if you know what you’re looking for, you can definitely streamline the process. The considerations are going to be threefold—performance, security, and experience. You need to look for a company that offers you a dedicated server, which will give you the greatest control and performance over your website. Furthermore, you need a company that offers you protection from DDoS, as well as monitoring for other kinds of malicious attacks. Lastly, you need to make sure that the service you’re hiring has a long history of providing quality service to customers.
Once you’ve figured out those three things, you can feel confident in your choice of server.