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Good hosting is essential to leverage your online results and, despite being extremely important, it is often overlooked by many managers. With that in mind, we have prepared a guide to help you choose the best type of hosting for your agency!
The big hit
There is a big hit and a big mistake for almost every digital agency that is taking its first steps.
You probably started by getting it right: you wanted to build great brands for your customers, taking care of their websites, campaigns, and email marketing with excellence.
You probably seek best practices to show results to your customers.
You read the best sources.
You optimize campaigns.
You use the best applications.
These are all very positive points.
If you study the best sources, optimize your campaigns, and seek to use the best applications, you are already on a great path to delivering the best results to your customers.
But there is a detail in all of this.
A detail that often goes unnoticed by many digital agency technology managers or directors and that may have gone unnoticed by you, too.
And it turns out to be a big mistake made by digital agencies that are starting their journey.
The big mistake
Your smart strategy, optimizations, applications will do no good if your foundations are not solid.
And the foundation of it all is - good hosting.
- Your customer’s key sites depend on your hosting.
- Your client’s websites depend on your hosting.
- Your customer’s email marketing depends on your hosting.
YOUR agency’s website depends on your hosting.
You think of all the campaigns. Think about landing pages. Think about follow ups. Think of lead capture.
But hosting ends up being left out. And that’s a big mistake.
Before talking about the different types of hosting, we will expose some of the main problems you may have if you neglect this fundamental part of your agency.
How bad hosting can affect your agency’s results
Using a low quality hosting to host your agency’s website and your client’s websites and emails brings several problems to your business.
Let’s see some of them and how they affect your agency’s results!
Low-performance
The first major problem is poor performance.
Low-quality hosting generally does not have enough infrastructure to provide high-performance pages (we’ll explain more about that below).
Imagine that your agency created an incredible website for a client, with beautiful images, well-made texts and a high potential for lead conversion.
Imagine now that all this effort is thrown away simply because the site takes too long to load.
Terrible, right?
Some figures help to better understand this situation:
- Did you know that just 1 second delay in a website’s response time equals a 7% decrease in sales conversion rate?
- And that just 3 seconds of loading a site results in the abandonment of 40% of visitors?
A low quality hosting will bring low performance to your pages.
Your customers (and your agency!) May lose sales simply because of the time it takes to load websites.
You agree that this is almost unacceptable, right?
Lower security
The other point that we want to draw attention to in having a low quality hosting has to do with security.
We will give more details on this below.
For now, it is enough to say that a low quality hosting will bring potential security problems to its customers.
Let’s imagine that one of your customers is an e-commerce.
Like all e-commerce, his website will have a registration system and a payment system.
Customers who buy from this e-commerce will provide emails, passwords and card details to make payments, right?
Have you ever thought of having customer data exposed or stolen because your hosting is not secure?
Having a good hosting provider is not just a matter of performance.
It is directly related to the security of your customer’s applications.
Related article: Web Hosting 101 - A Complete Guide
Types of Hosting
Shared Hosting
This type of hosting is one of the most traditional and has dominated the internet for decades.
The name is quite straightforward to explain how shared hosting works: hundreds of sites are shared within the same server.
This type of hosting provided very well what web applications demanded for a long time. Just remember what the sites were like in the 90s.
If you don’t remember, let’s recap a little.
In the early 1990s, the commercial internet was still in its infancy. The internet infrastructure was still developing and websites were not as complex as we see today.
Internet connections were not good. Most of the sites were static. The number of visitors were small.
All of this contributed to making this type of hosting so widely used.
In shared hosting, hundreds of websites are stored within the same server, which ends up reducing costs, both for the hosting provider and for the client.
However, today the reality of the internet is quite different from what it was in the early 90s.
The connections are much more powerful. Dynamic websites dominate the internet. The number of requests is huge.
Although this type of hosting was quite satisfactory for the 90s, nowadays it can cause a number of problems if your customer’s website:
Has elements that demand more connection, such as images or videos. Has a catalog of products or services. Has more complex requests, such as financial transactions.
Due to the complexity of current websites and the way shared hosting places different applications within the same server, it may not be the ideal type of hosting for your agency and your client’s website.
The fact that many sites and applications are located within the same server can cause serious problems.
- If a server’s website is hacked, your customer’s website can be hacked;
- If a server site has a peak in access, your client’s site may go down;
- If a server’s website sends spam, your customer’s emails may also end up in the spam box.
Although shared hosting was very effective at the beginning of the internet, it is no longer the ideal type of hosting for modern applications.
Therefore, another type of accommodation has emerged, which we will talk about next.
Cloud Server
This type of hosting is more recent and has been gaining millions of followers worldwide.
This type of server emerged as a response to the evolution of web applications.
As we mentioned above, today they demand much more from servers than in the 90s.
There are many more visitors. There are many more heavy files. There are many more processes being done every second.
Infrastructure companies have realized that it was necessary to keep pace with the growth and complexity of the Internet and so developed the servers in the cloud (servers cloud).
A cloud server is a type of server made up of hundreds of interconnected servers, forming a gigantic infrastructure.
All this infrastructure was created to bring more stability, performance, and security to modern applications.
All this power has made many agencies to become interested in this type of hosting.
Even so, shared hosting is still the most used.
Do you know why?
There is a very important detail in all of this.
Despite being extremely powerful and bringing more stability, more performance and more security to your customer’s applications, configuring a cloud server is extremely complicated.
To install and configure a server in the cloud, the professional must understand things like sudo permission, root directory, FTP credentials, IP, secret key …
All installation, configuration, optimization and management of this type of server takes a lot of time and several manual interventions by highly trained professionals.
This means that many agencies, even wanting to migrate their applications to servers in the cloud, end up opting for less complex solutions, such as shared hosting.
Tiiny Host Simplicity
However, tiiny.host is the simplest cloud-based hosting solution available. You don’t need any knowledge of the cloud to host your or your client’s sites.
Simply create a zip file with your html files and upload your site for free. It takes less than 30 seconds.
Conclusion
Let’s do a quick summary of what you read in today’s Digital Hypers, ok?
- A basic mistake that your agency cannot make: Neglecting your hosting and that of your clients;
- A high performance and high-security hosting will be the basis for your customer’s websites, landing pages, hot sites, and memorable email marketing campaigns;
- The most common type of hosting is still shared hosting, which started in the early ‘90s, even though it was quite satisfactory for the beginning of the internet, nowadays this type of hosting is no longer ideal;
- Then came Cloud Servers, infrastructures formed by hundreds of servers, bringing much more security, stability, and performance to the applications;
- Tiiny Host is the simplest cloud hosting provider available for freelancers & agencies.
This article of ours is a guide so that you can make the best decision on what is the best type of hosting for your agency, depending on the type of application that your client’s websites have and how many resources you can invest.
Remember, hosting is the foundation of your customer’s websites, landing pages, key sites, and emails.
Web Hosting 101 - A complete Guide