Creating a functional and visually appealing website is just the first step in building an effective online presence for businesses and government agencies in Australia. Once you have created a website that meets all your requirements, you then need to find a cost-effective web hosting solution that will enable your site to function flawlessly at all times. To make sure that you pick the right solution, you should consider all the relevant factors carefully. If you’re not sure what these factors are, the following guide contains some very useful pointers.
What type of web hosting services are right for your organisation?
There are a number of specific types of Australian web hosting services available today. When you are evaluating each type, you should bear the following factors in mind:
- The number of visitors you expect — At the cheapest end of the scale are shared hosting services, where multiple websites are hosted on a single physical server. At the other end of the scale, we have cloud hosting, where your website is hosted across multiple servers in a cloud network. For small sites with few visitors, a shared hosting plan is often the most economical solution. For busy commercial sites, cloud hosting is a solid option. In between these extremes we have VPS hosting and dedicated hosting, which are commonly used to support smaller commercial websites.
- Who would you like to maintain your web server(s) — If you really want to maintain your own servers and software, colocation hosting is the best choice. If you would rather have all maintenance tasks handled by your hosting provider, you should look at shared, VPS, dedicated or cloud hosting solutions.
- Your future requirements — If you are expecting your website traffic to grow substantially in the future, you’ll need a hosting solution that can expand to meet this increased demand. A dedicated hosting plan is one possible solution but if you want the most flexible solution possible, cloud hosting is the way to go. With a robust cloud hosting solution, you will be able to increase or decrease the resources you use at any time, making it very easy for you to adapt to fluctuations in traffic.
- Uptime — For smaller websites that are not critical to the daily activities of an organisation, uptime is not a major concern. However, if you are running a busy government or private sector website and you need to ensure that it is always accessible, you should pick a hosting solution with the maximum guaranteed uptime. Cloud hosting is once more the preferred solution in this regard. Using a network of interconnected servers, a cloud platform does not have a single point of failure that could take your website down, making it a more resilient hosting solution that is suitable for mission-critical websites.
Once you have chosen a type of web hosting that meets your needs, you will need to consider which specific service provider you are going to work with. While bigger is not always better, most experts recommend choosing an established service provider with an excellent reputation.