We get asked what makes our hosting different. So we will try to explain in this article. There are many different types of hosting and they can range from a few hundred a year, to a few thousand dollars a month. Usually we'll recommend a specific type of hosting based on your project specifications. Ultimately, each level of hosting has some inherent risks, advantages and disadvantages.
Before we get to the different types of hosting, it's important to note that hosting with Creating Digital always includes the following items which are usually an additional charge or not offered elsewhere:
- 24x7 Monitoring of the server. Support team reacts normally within 5 minutes of any alert.
- Off Site Backups. Don't risk your backups being in the same facility as the issue!
- RAID by default. Meaning every server has multiple hard drives to avoid against downtime and data corruption.
- Firewalls with greedy blocking (Only ports needed are opened).
- Firewalls are repopulated every day with list of known bad actors.
- Redundant Network Setup in all data centers.
Shared Hosting
This is the most popular hosting for small businesses. Usually the price breaks out to be $20 or less a month. Some providers even offer it for as low as $2-$5 a month. We recommend highly that you run away from these providers.
Shared hosting means that many clients are put onto a single server to share its resources. Many small businesses do not need to incur the cost of managing and securing a server for their website so this option makes sense. They share resources such as memory, disk space, bandwidth, disk io (the bandwidth of a hard drive), and other resources.
Unlike some of our hosting competitors, we don’t cram 1,000’s of sites on a single server. We limit server usage to approximately 100 active sites (10% of what our competitors deem normal). Creating Digital also only hosts its own customers on these servers; think of it as a private club membership. This allows Creating Digital to ensure new sites won’t affect any existing sites on the server before it goes online. Other hosting companies, who sell to the public, can’t come close to offering that level of protection!
Why stay away from the cheaper hosts?
Obviously, the cheaper the price, the more clients that are crammed onto the server. For example, one notorious hosting company puts over 1,200 sites on a single server. This can be especially problematic because if one or more sites experience issues with traffic, poor coding, or configurations it could bring down all of the sites on that server. On normal days, the server is so busy handling other sites request that it queues responses, meaning your site is not loading as fast as it could or should be. This could cause visitors to get frustrated and leave your site, or even worse having google push your sites listing further down the results because of poor speed factors.
But the cheap host says they offer unlimited xyz?
Yes some host say they offer that, I have yet to see a hard drive on the market that offers unlimited space. The offer is bogus, in the fine print they limit things 99% of people don't understand like iops, file descriptors, queries, active shared memory and other items that gives them plenty of room to back out later on or charge high overage fees. Some providers even limit the number of simultaneous visitors to the site. We once had a client who ran a big advertising campaign to find out their third party host wouldn't server the website to more than 10 active people. All that money was wasted just to save $3 a month!
Server Hosting
This is a popular choice for medium and large businesses. In this scenario the server instance is occupied solely by your company. Because of this we have ultimate flexibility in scheduling upgrades, maintenance, specifying exactly what software packages are and are not available. You have dedicated resources in terms of memory, disk space and cpu allocation. If you pick a server with 16GB ram, 4 CPU's and 200GB of space, that is all yours. No one else is using or sharing any of those resources and they are 100% available to your website 24x7. The cost here is often several hundred dollars a month.
This level offers a high level of stability and uptime.
High Availability Hosting
High Availability hosting usually involves multiple servers that copy data instantly between them. In this setup, it is usually common to have a load balancer in front of the servers as well. This setup is great for business that need a very high level of availability for their business. This kind of setup can adapt and handle a large traffic spike such as appearing on the New York Times homepage or being mentioned in multiple news sources. This kind of setup is also resilient against hardware failures.
Because there are multiple servers, if a server was to fail, the load balancer health checks identify that and immediately route all traffic to a working server. This gives your team time to fix the faulty server with zero interruption to live traffic. Often the cost of this kind of setup are in the thousand plus range per month.
Multi Geographic Hosting
This is the most advanced kind of hosting. This scenario is often used for companies that need to have an always on business continuity plan for their application. In this scenario, the server's data is cloned between servers in two different geographically located data centers. For example, in New Jersey and in California. One of the data center sites are the primary site, meaning all normal traffic is routed there on a daily basis. Should a catastrophic event happen to the data center such as a fire, flood, hurricane, etc all traffic could be configured to route to the secondary site. This is the most expensive kind of hosting.