How Does Web Hosting Affect a Website?

Web hosting is an essential component of any website — whether it is self-hosted like WordPress or hosted like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify. However, the web hosting option you choose can impact what your website design can do for you.

So to answer the question, ‘does your choice of web hosting affect your website,’ the answer is emphatical “Yes.”

Your choice of web hosting solution impacts more than just the type of website you are building. It could also have an impact on how well the website performs in the future. Many of the challenges that websites suffer when it comes to critical elements like speed, security, and SEO are often caused by web hosting use.

Hosted vs. Self-Hosted

There is surely very little to worry about when you build your website with a hosted site builder platform. These site builders offer to host — hosting that they manage — by default, so all you have to do is design your website.

However, this may not be the best option unless you own a small business or work as a freelancer.

Control panel access — which is often only available when purchasing your web hosting for a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress — gives your web designer greater control over the backend. Self-hosting also allows you to own your data. This means that if you decide to switch to a different site builder platform in the future, you will not have to start from the ground up. With hosted platforms, this will be a problem.

Uptime & Performance

Customers are offered certain performance guarantees with many leading web hosting solutions. This is due to web hosting providers outfitting their servers with speed boosters such as caching, NGINX, and SSD drives.

And most web hosting solutions — excluding shared hosting — include a failover option. This means that if a server crashes, your website does not have to go offline since it can simply connect to other servers on the network. This is why many hosting providers can guarantee 99.9% uptime.

Nevertheless, some hosting providers, hosting plans, and hosted site builders do not offer any guarantees.

If this is the case, and you have committed to one of these web hosting solutions, you must understand how sluggish web pages and downtime will impact your bottom line. Hosting without a performance guarantee should not be used by businesses that hope to drive a large number of visitors to their site or engage in server-intensive activities.

Security

To effectively secure your CMS and web host, you must have greater control over both. If your web hosting plan (or built-in hosting) does not allow this, you may expose your site visitors to hackers or viruses.

If you build a website that collects data through a contact form, processes payments, and tracks visitor data via cookies, the web host’s security must be a top priority. This means that:

• Backups are part of the hosting plan.
• SSL certificates are either included or available as an add-on.
• The web host lets you implement additional security features such as a firewall, multi-factor authentication, and more.

If you plan to develop an online store that sells thousands of products, you must ensure that the hosting you purchase can handle such traffic and is secure enough. If you are unsure, contact a WordPress web design company — they will help you find the best solutions for your business.