The difference between choosing the right webhost and choosing the wrong webhost is like the difference between buying a car and leasing a car. When you buy a car, you pay more upfront, and you have to take more responsibility, but you save money in the future. When you lease a car, you don’t pay as much upfront, but you will have to pay more over the life of your purchase. However cost effective webhosting techniques can be less intuitive than the difference between buying and leasing a car.
Assumptions
This post makes the assumption that you have a basic familiarity with different kinds of webhosting. The purpose of this post is to show some cost effective techniques that I don’t see considered on more generic blog posts about webhosting.
Managed Webhosts Can Solve Problems and Create New Ones
Managed webhosts will often lure customers in by creating an environment where the caching is set up for them and the server space does not need to be shared. And this environment does provide improved site performance. But it is usually an environment that provides undetectable performance advantages for the average site if the site was set up properly on a shared host. The consequence is over time you pay a lot more for your hosting than you would if you had set up your site properly on a shared host. This could be true even if you paid someone to set up your site for you.
Shared Hosting has a Bad Reputation
Shared hosting has a bad reputation because people don’t understand its use cases or how to set it up properly. Much of the “web development” world is explained by people that market themselves as web developers even though they couldn’t code a hello world program.
If you set up your site using a full caching system, then you will most likely be able to run a fast loading site that can tolerate a pretty high level of traffic, even on a shared host. The trick is to let your CDN do most of the heavy lifting.
But shared hosting has it’s limits. If your site has a lot of server driven scripting that can’t be page cached (like an e-commerce site), than a shared server may not be a great choice. However, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t benefit from some of the cost effectiveness of a shared server for part of your site.
Shared Hosting and E-Commerce
Suppose you built a website for a pizza restaurant. Initially, you decided that you didn’t want to deal with the cost and management of an online ordering system so you just added a phone link to your site. But as your business improved, you started to find that handling orders over the phone was no longer cost effective, so you decide to add an online ordering system to your website. But you’re worried about potential e-commerce performance and security problems with a shared server. Should you put your website on a new webhost and rebuild it to satisfy ordering?
Why Not Build a Second E-Commerce Website?
What if you just kept your existing website and added a new website on a new webhost that was better suited for ordering? You could set up a link to your existing website, then create a new domain like order.website.com.
You should consider the added cost of running two webhosts. Hypothetically, paying for two webhosts could be more expensive. However, a server suitable for e-commerce will most likely have costs that grow as your site gets more successful. And shared server fees are low and usually paid at a flat rate. Also, informational sites tend to need fewer host resources. But informational sites tend to drive more traffic than their respective e-commerce sites.
Minimizing Technological Collisions
Your ordering site ought to minimize it’s file sizes and scripting. You will probably want to compromise on appearance to make sure that your ordering site loads as fast as possible. Managing and maintenance of each site will likely have unique challenges. If you combine each site into one than you will likely add management and maintenance costs due to new conflicts caused by the colliding technological problems. For example, ordering systems have lower compatibility with content delivery networks. And informational sites usually benefit from from runtime script files that are unnecessary on ordering sites.
Minimizing Traffic on Your Ordering Site
Shared hosting often allows for nearly unlimited resource use. But a host suited for e-commerce will almost certainly charge for resources. You could also keep your ordering website unsearchable to add security and drive down superficial traffic. But you can’t do that with an informational site. Most people that look on your informational site may not actually order anything. If the traffic from people that are just looking is separated from the traffic of people that are actually ordering than you can minimize the resources that you have to pay to your ordering site’s webhost.
Geographic Necessity and Cost Effective Webhosting Techniques
Another thing to consider is the locality of your business. If most of your ordering site has to run on your host server, and your host is local to your business, and your customers are all local (like for a pizzeria); then using the CDN that your informational site relies on may be unnecessarily complicated. However, using a CDN for an informational site is pretty much mandatory.
What if Your Ordering System Fails?
You may find that your business is sustainable, but your ordering system is more hassle than it’s worth. If you have a separate ordering site, then you can just shut it down. Done.
But if you have tied your ordering system directly into your informational site. Then you have to manually deconstruct the ordering system. And then you’re still left with your informational site running on an unnecessarily expensive webhost.
The Bottom Line is Websites are Dynamic
Your website should grow with your level of service. You shouldn’t pay for more than what you need. If you start your website with a solid foundation, then you can add services as they become necessary. Just make sure you consider what it might take to remove those resources.
Got Questions?
Let me know if I wrote something that didn’t make sense or if I left out something that I should have included.