Category: webhost

Subscription Website: Developing a Website Using Subscription Services

Posted on by Bob Wilson

Have you been thinking about developing your website by purchasing a subscription website? Subscription websites have aggressive marketing campaigns. So you’ve probably heard of a few. But are any of them a good option for you to use to build your website?

Defining a Subscription Website

A subscription website is a website that you have to pay a monthly fee to use. This goes beyond simple server fees. A subscription website wraps everything up into a single package. This may seem like a good idea if you want to keep things simple, and if you have the means to pay a premium. But a subscription website is expensive over the long term, and it requires you to give up your freedom to mix and match different services and features.

It’s important to mention that the subscription websites that I’ll be referencing are referring to subscription websites that are used to create websites. I am NOT referring to subscription websites that people pay a subscription fee to visit. Those kinds of sites are often referred to as membership websites.

Subscription Services Versus Subscription Websites

Not everything that is paid for with a subscription fee ought to be considered a full blown subscription website. For example, many services charge a subscription fee for using software. This may or may not be a good idea depending on the quality and services provided by the software distributors. But if you are applying the software to a website that you own, then you should not consider yourself a user of a subscription website. You are only a user of subscription software.

Managed Hosting Versus a Subscription Website

I discussed managed hosting in an earlier article. You shouldn’t consider this a subscription website. However, subscription websites tend to include managed hosting which gives them another reason to charge you more money.

Buying Your Website Versus Leasing Your Website

Subscription websites don’t really allow you to own your website. When you build a website yourself or with a developer, you can own all of the software that makes it run. And you aren’t forced to use templates that force you to add content you don’t want, and/or don’t allow you to use content that you want to use.

Breaking Down the Long Term Costs of Different Web Builds

In the short term, a subscription website might not seem so bad. But if you add up the costs over time, then you might get a different impression.

Anecdotally, my research has shown me that a cheap subscription website will run you at least sixteen dollars a month while the most expensive sites run as high as two hundred and fifty dollars a month plus a set up fee. It’s also worth noting that the low end of the subscription website price range is about the same price as a low end managed hosting service. So you can imagine that the low price subscription service probably provides pretty minimal quality.

But suppose you were only going to pay sixteen dollars per month for the minimal service. After five years, you’ll have paid almost a thousand dollars. And then you still have to keep paying. That means even if you paid a thousand dollars total for a custom website built by a developer (and your site would probably work a lot better than a sixteen dollar a month subscription website), you would still end up paying less than you would for a subscription website if you owned your custom website for over five years.

If you own your custom website for over ten years, then your price would eventually get cut in half even after server fees. Don’t forget that your monthly fees for your subscription website are likely to rise. You should also consider that if you don’t need a large website, you can probably get a nice custom site for a lot less than a thousand dollars.

Subscription Website: Lost Ownership

If you own your business, then why wouldn’t it be important to own your website. When you don’t own your website, then you’re at the mercy of the true website owner. Your owner can charge you whatever amount that they deem to be appropriate. And your only recourse is to build a completely new website. If you own your website’s content and most or all of its software, then you won’t need to rebuild it from scratch.

Losing Control of Supporting Services

Does your business require an ordering service or a shop? Who owns that? What if you want to update your shop without updating your primary website or vice versa? How much control do you have? When you own your base website, you may also own your commerce software, or you may pay a subscription fee for the software (like for a pizza shop). In either case, the software can operate independently from the rest of your website. So you can update your supporting service vendors without it affecting the rest of your website.

But if you have a subscription website, then you can get stuck with the same vendor for all of your software. And this minimizes your vendor’s competition because of the increased expense of you changing vendors, thus incentivizing you to keep your subscription website.

How Much Control Over Your Website’s Design Do You Have?

If you like the way your subscription website looks, then there is something to be said for that. But if you want any creative input, then subscription websites can be cumbersome. Subscription websites have a lot more room to either push back or gouge you on prices. If they know that you are afraid to own your website, then what is your recourse if they tell you no?

Subscription Website: The Cost of a Major Overhaul

When you own your site, you can compartmentalize parts of your site, so you can avoid ever having to completely rebuild from scratch. But if you want to leave your subscription website, then starting over from scratch may be your only choice. Your subscription site may have proprietary software that doesn’t transfer. And more likely than not, they’ll try to talk you into overhauling your website by staying with them, requiring you to continue to pay their higher prices.

Do You Need Help Setting Up Your Website?

Setting up your website yourself can seem overwhelming. It can be helpful to work with a professional. Check out my custom development services to lean more.

Questions?

If you have any questions, then please post them in the comments section.

Hosting Definitions: Choosing Between Shared, Cloud, VPS, Dedicated, and Managed Hosting

Posted on by Bob Wilson

Shared, cloud, VPS, dedicated, and managed hosting are five different hosting definitions that you should consider when deciding how to host a website. Understanding these definitions can be really confusing and time consuming, so I decided to write this article for anyone who is looking for an efficient set of definitions that will allow them to make an informed decision.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

Here is the short version of this article. You will probably be able to get by just fine if you use a solid shared web host. You can use this blog to figure out how to set your site up properly, or you can hire a pro to set it up for you for a modest one time flat rate. If your site needs more power after it becomes popular, then you can switch to a managed cloud hosting service.

If you want hear why you should do this, then keep reading.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting means exactly what it sounds like. Your website will share server space with other websites. The downside of doing this is the performance of the other sites can impact your site’s performance. The upside is you share the cost of using the server with the other website owners.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is hosting your site through a network of servers. It can be more complicated than shared hosting, and it will probably cost you more money, but it tends to have a better performance potential, especially if you are getting a lot of traffic. It is also worth noting that you will probably still need to use a CDN even if you choose cloud hosting.

Hosting Definitions: Defining VPS Hosting

VPS hosting can be basically defined as shared hosting without the sharing or cloud hosting without as much scalability. I could write a lot more about VPS hosting, but I want to keep this post as simple as possible. All you need to know is I don’t imagine that you would choose VPS hosting given your other options. However, if you don’t want to take my word for it, then feel free to dive into the weeds.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting means that you get the whole server to yourself. It’s expensive and complicated. Even if you know a lot about servers, this will probably still be way more power and responsibility than you will want or need, so it really isn’t worth considering.

Does Shared Web Hosting Suck?

Shared web hosting gets a bad rap. It’s not perfect. And it’s not always an adequate solution. But if you know how to set up a site properly, then it will probably give you the results you need to build a high performing website. Conversely, although other kinds of hosting are sometimes a good choice for certain circumstances, they are often unnecessarily expensive. Too often people choose other kinds of hosting to fix mistakes that don’t actually require changing their hosting package.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Managed Hosting

Unless you are running your website on a private server on your private property, you will always be paying your host for some level of management. Therefore, the term management can be somewhat confusing. When something is advertised as managed, it can mean different things for different purposes. And even if the hosting package doesn’t advertise itself as managed, there were will be services managed for you such as the server itself or software such as CPanel. When a hosting package is specifically advertised as managed, it tends to refer to installing and managing site specific software.

Is Managed WordPress Hosting a Good Deal?

I would never turn a customer away for using managed WordPress hosting, but it’s really hard for me to recommend it in good conscience. The difference between managed WordPress hosting and setting up a WordPress site yourself on a shared web host is kind of like the difference between buying a car and leasing a car. Just like leasing a car, over the life of the product’s use, getting a managed site will probably just cost you more money without any improvement in quality.

Managed WordPress Hosting is Often Shared Hosting

You should consider that a managed WordPress service is often performed on a shared server. Basically what web hosts do is charge you to set up software that you could set up yourself for free. If setting up this software seems daunting, then it might not seem like a bad deal. But if you consider that you could pay a professional web developer a one time fee to set it up for you, the deal from the managed hosting company might not seem so good. Why? Because the managed service provider will keep charging you a premium subscription fee in perpetuity.

How Good Are the Services Provided by the Managed Host?

You should consider the possibility that the managed host will actually produce a performance that is worse than something that you could set up yourself or have set up by a professional web developer.

Managed hosting has to figure out a standardized way to set up your website. This will often (but not always) produce good results. But this method will have a lot harder time producing great results because a website only has to use one idea that the standardized method doesn’t know how to handle for a significant performance detriment to be triggered.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Cloud Hosting

There are reasons that you may want a server that is higher performing than something that shared hosting can provide. If you’re site is getting unusually high traffic and/or if your site needs to run a lot of server side operations, then you may want to choose something more powerful than a shared server. However, if you just switch from a shared host to a managed shared host, then you are unlikely to see any improvement. In most instances, if shared hosting isn’t cutting it, then cloud hosting is the solution.

Hosting Definitions: Defining Managed Cloud Hosting

There are some circumstances where certain kinds of managed hosting may not be a bad idea. For example, if you have an e-commerce site with a lot of traffic, then you may want to consider using managed cloud hosting with a managing service like Cloudways because cloud hosting can be complicated. However, if you are just starting a new website, it is unlikely that you will need cloud hosting to run your site.

What is the Value of Your Time?

There are those who would be dissatisfied with having anything less than full control over their own dedicated server. However, if your goal is to get a quality server performance without spending too much time or money, then an unmanaged shared hosting package is the way to go most of the time. Once you set up your software properly, you can let your shared hosting provider do the rest of the heavy lifting. Most standard web host packages deal with most of the real hard problems of server management. So if you pay for a “managed” hosting package, then you will probably be just getting upsold into purchasing frivolous options that you could acquire for free.

How Much Power Do You Really Need?

Paying extra money for an average page load time that drops from an eighth of a second to a fifth of a second probably isn’t worth it. There is an endless sea of data to show how paying more will facilitate a faster page load. But if your visitors can’t actually detect the difference, then what is the point of the extra expense? So if you are considering a legitimate managed hosting option like for cloud hosting, then you should first consider the needs of your visitors relative to the content you are providing.

How Much Do You Want to Spend? And How Much Do You Need to Spend? How Long Should You Stay With the Same Web Host?

If the value of your time is worth much of anything, then you don’t want to nickel and dime yourself by constantly looking for the best deal. You also don’t want to slowly crush your overhead by paying a bunch of expenses that are totally unnecessary. When you pick a hosting provider, you should consider how much you are spending up front. And you should consider how much you will be spending after your initial offer is over.

Yes. You can keep jumping from one host to the next to keep your expenses down. But you should really figure out how much time that it will cost you. What is your time worth? How much do you think you ought to be getting paid per hour? Even if you think the value of your time to make the transfer is going to be worth less than the savings, then you still have to ask yourself, “Is the added stress worth the discount?”

Be Willing to Upgrade if You Need To

If your site starts taking on more traffic that it can handle, or if you need to provide features that your hosting package can’t deliver well, then you may want to consider updating to a more powerful hosting package. This may also be a good time to consider reorganizing your site. Often times ideas for sites come together in an ad hoc fashion. If you have to change hosts, you may want to consider separating your content from your content management and think about ways you can make improvements to your site.

In most cases, starting with a solid shared hosting package will probably be all that you will ever need to do. The volume of competition is such that prices tend to stay low with whomever you choose. However, if you do start to feel exploited, then switching to another hosting provider should be reasonably feasible. VPS hosting is more niche and is probably something that you will never need. Dedicated hosting will almost never be a good idea. And cloud hosting is good if you need to get big.

Questions?

If you have any questions, then please leave them in the comments section. If you would like me to review your existing site or build you a new site, then please read about my services.

Cost Effective Webhosting Techniques

Posted on by Bob Wilson

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.