What is the difference between a budget web host and a premium web hosting
Short answer a lot! Put another way Success or failure.
Many well made and well-funded websites have failed from day one because of poor website hosting. It is normally as simple as trying to run a $10,000 website on $80 gold coast web hosting account. The logic dumbfounds me sometimes.
A little background on how website hosting works
Often I am too technical so I will try not to go full nerd on you.
Simply put, Website hosting is like the reverse of your home broadband plan. While at home you download content and the better your connection the more you can download and enjoy at speed. The opposite is true of your website, the faster and more compacity your web hosting plan has the faster you can send data our to your users.
Factors affecting website hosting performance
Location or latency: That is the time it takes for the signal or ping from your average user to reach your server and return.
Disk Speed: Just like on your home computer there are different quality disks and configurations. Normally with servers, they are set up in RAIDS which is just a fancy term for how they function together. Raid 0 is the fastest, but the least safe as there is no redundancy RAID 1 and 10 offer the best performance and redundancy, RAID 10 being the better. Disk wise you have HDD, SAS, SSD normal and enterprise level. Enterprise is better through a normal drive will be okay if your running in RAID 10. HDD is the older style disk (like most home computers), SAS is a faster setup and often called high performance. SSD is the quickest offering 40x 100x faster read/write speed. Awesome if you have something like a store or heavy user database system.
RAM: Holds the website data in quickly accessible memory, the more website the more RAM needed, the more users the more RAM needed. More RAM doesn’t always mean faster speeds, but not enough does mean slower speeds and possible crashing if things get to overloaded.
CPU: CPU is the same as at home, but with servers, you can have more CPU units. You have your quad-core etc as well. More CPU means better processing power. Again great for large DB sites like e-commerce stores.
OS and Modules: This is servers do get a little complicated. Servers run with an OS the website lives on the OS and you interact with it in the hosting account or deep still if you have a VPS or Dedicated server you may have a few layers. The interesting thing about server OS is it’s not all the same its just as varied as your phone. Some are better than others; such as cpanel is more stable than Plesk. Additionally, they have apps or modules and these do extra tasks like run firewalls, logs, brute-force protection, cache the websites. Depending on how these are configured you can have average and awesome out of the same system.
Low Budget means death to your site
So the budget web hosting plans are basically oversold on resources and running on old worn out equipment waiting to be scrapped. No care, no attention, little resources.
End result your website will run slow, it will load slow, it may go offline underload.
My users don’t care about that and it’s only a small site, so what?
Slow websites do not rank well in Google. Now if your site is loading in over 6-7seconds you might as well forget success. The whole purpose of a site is to rank well. That is where the expense and the value of your site is. For example, a nothing page on a nothing domain that ranks well is actually work something. A great site with no ranking is worth next to nothing.
Pay the money for good web hosting
Pay the money for fast web hosting it is well worth it. Make sure it suits your target location and make sure its at least SSD now. It will pay for itself 10x fold.
