Website Hosting and Domain – Luxhosting.lu

Everything You Need to Know About Webhosting

Samantha — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 08:30:57 +0000

Ready to launch a website? With thousands of websites going live daily from new startups, online stories, online communities and blogs; owning a website has become synonymous with business. But what does it take to build a website and an online business from the ground up? First, you need to start with the foundation of your business or website. That’s where webhosting comes in. Before you launch your website, you will need the internet real estate necessary to facilitate it. If you’ve already been operating a website but need a brush up on the finer aspects of internet hosting this guide is also for you. Perhaps you’re looking to upgrade your hosting solution, add more security features or look into adding tools like website monitoring. Whatever your hosting needs this guide seeks to help you decide on what is best for a new website or help you decide on the upgrades you want to an existing one. Let’s dive in.

A Quick Overview of Webhosting

Simply put webhosting is the space on a computer server where a website is hosted. Your hosting provider has powerful servers that help serve your website to end users all across the world. Web hosting makes it possible for your domain address to serve your website to anyone that types in the URL. All data like pictures, blog posts, product pages, videos, text files, specialized software and website plugins to help your website be functional, look aesthetically pleasing and serve your content to your audience is made possible via your hosting environment. Web hosting comes in 3 environments. Let’s look at the next.

Types of WebHosting Environments

Understanding the options, you have where hosting is concerned is important to the future scalability and success of your website. Knowing where to begin to suit your business size helps you match the hosting plan that is right for you. The three main types of hosting include:

Shared

VPS-cloud based

Dedicated

Shared Webhosting environment

Multiple websites are shared one server. This consist of sharing the physical server and the software components within the server. The advantage of shared hosting is that there is an affordable price point. This is because the cost to operate the server is shared between you and the other website owners. Shared hosting is recommended for new websites, small blogs and businesses. With new technology, shared webhosting is scalable and can grow with your website.

VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting is a virtualized server. A VPS hosting environment behaves like a dedicated server within a shared environment giving you the best of both worlds. VPS hosting gives you the affordability of shared hosting while at the same time giving you more power and control like a dedicated server. Learn how to reinforce your VPS Hosting Firewall, read more here.

Dedicated Hosting

In a dedicated hosting environment, you have the entire server, meaning no other website owner shares the server with you. This result is faster performance for your website, as you have complete access to the physical server and its software components.

8 WebHosting Essentials

1. 24/7 Technical Support

Websites don’t have operating hours. Your online business is fully functional 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week and as such your technical support should be available to you at any time. Things can go wrong and when they do you need expert support to help set things right. As your business grows and your website begins to use more sophisticated apps and systems that are more intricate for daily operations, expert around the clock technical support will be a vital lifeline.

2. Website Monitoring Tools

All websites require constant monitoring to ensure that security breaches do not happen, uptime is always at 99.9%, server health, web applications, metrics and network performance just to name a few. You need a webhosting provider that offers monitoring 24/7/365 to ensure your website is always functioning at it‘s optimum and is secure.

3. Website Backup Solutions

Another excellent feature to look for in a robust hosting provider is Backup. Your website nor you can afford to lose data or your client’s sensitive information therefor you need to constantly have automatic backups in place in case something happens to your website. With shared hosting you want a webhosting solution to provide regular off-site backups of your site to protect you and your future customers. For example, if you run a product-based website or a blog and you are constantly adding new items or content, in the event that something goes wrong, or a security breach happens due to a cybercriminal, having a saved version of your latest site update can save you time and money.

4. Guaranteed Site Up-time

Nothing ruins an online business’ reputation faster than a website site that is constantly going offline or one that is unavailable. Your audience and would–be customers are depending on your website to always be available when they need it. This can happen sometimes on shared servers that are old or not properly maintain and host too many websites. Having a site that doesn’t have a steady up-time can not only affect your business’ reputation but it can also hurt your search engine ranking, and lower confidence in your brand. Therefore, you need a hosting provider that can guarantee you site up-time 99.9% of the time. You also need to ensure that your web hast fast shared hosting.

5. Robust Security Features

Having great web security is crucial to your site’s success and reputation with your audience and clients. Cybercriminals and hackers are using more and more sophisticated software systems to probe millions of sites daily to exploit vulnerabilities and bring sites offline. Cybercriminals will use any vulnerability it can find in your website’s defences to bring your site to its knees. For this reason, you must ensure that the hosting provider you choose uses the utmost in web security. What’s more, is that a breached site can cost you hundreds of pounds in fines and fees as security is the utmost in data protection for your customers.

6. SSL Certificates

While security is a top priority in data protection and internet safety, having SSL Certificates is a must. SSL Certificates protects your user‘s data as it passes from server to server making all connections secure. SSL Certificates are especially important for anyone operating an online store, web forum or sign account sections of a website, and so much more. In fact, not using the secured https:// can affect your ranking on Google. Google now flags websites not using SSL Certificates as “Not Secure”. This can make online users wary of visiting your website so using a hosting provider that includes SSL Certificates automatically in their shared hosting plans is crucial.

7. WordPress Support

WordPress is one of the largest Content Management Systems (CMS) on the internet. Millions of websites use WordPress to power their sites and blogs. While WordPress may be a popular CMS used by over a third of websites, not all hosting providers are equipped to install WordPress. So, if you plan to use WordPress be sure that your chosen hosting company has the capabilities and tech support to use WordPress.

8. Domain Names

A domain name is a part of the URL that identifies it as belonging to a particular domain. The domain is the address where users can access your website. Once you’ve chosen on a webhosting package, you can brainstorm your domain name. Then purchase it with the TLD extension (.com, .net, .co.uk, etc.) you wish to use. Choosing a domain name can be hard, but you don’t want to hasten this process. Consider what you want your brand to embody in the name you choose. Be simple, concise, make it catchy and memorable.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Webhosting appeared first on Luxhosting.lu.

New Domain or Subdomain? What are the Pros and Cons?

Samantha — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:24:56 +0000

Understanding the difference between a new domain and a subdomain is the crucial step in deciding which option is best for you and your website. A new domain is an independent website with its own unique content, while alternatively a subdomain is a specific webpage in a directory on the main domain but operates independently.

When we mention subdomains within this article, we will be referring to a directory created within your root directory on your website which functions as an independent website, complete with its own admin and content files.

A subdomain can be created that uses WordPress as its CMS with the address site2.yoursite.com in a new folder called site2 in yoursite.com’s root directory and then installing WordPress into the site2’s folder.

Options available to you for creating subdomains for your website include:

Primary domain: www.yoursite.com
Subdomain: blog.yoursite.com
Domain: yoursite.com/ourstory
Subdomain: portfolio.yoursite.com
Subdomain: shop.yoursite.com

As you can see there is a distinct difference between the primary domain of your main website and the subdomain that you can create within your website’s root directory. There are pros and cons to using either option and this article hopes to discuss them in-depth. What’s better a subdomain or a new domain?

Which is best, a subdomain or a new domain?

Making the choice between a subdomain and a new domain depends entirely on the purpose of the website you are creating as well as the differences and purpose of the two as we highlighted in the introduction. There are three options to take into consideration when deciding.

Option 1: You want to establish a new brand name or match a domain with a specific branded product like yourproduct.com however, you may want to widen the range of products or services by promoting it on its own website under a broader umbrella-like yourproducts.com. Using a domain name that matches your brand in a broad spectrum and speaks to all of your products and services will be a better choice than a specific product domain name. Consider giants like amazon.com.

Option 2: You have a popular money-making domain name and want to begin promoting other products, services or content that are not connected with your original website domain.

Option 3: You have a personal website with a domain like mysite.com that has reasonable traffic and want to use as a marketing tool to promote some new products and services.

1. Existing Branding You Want to Retain

Time to dive deep into these options. So, if you have a website that exemplifies your brand and want to use it to propel a new product line or extend your existing product net, should you do so by creating subdomains for new products?

For example, you may have a baking site, sweetpastry.com, that mainly focuses on baking supplies and equipment. Your website starts doing really well and your brand awareness is expanding, it would not be wise to throw away that brand recognition by creating a new domain name for new baking supplies.

When your website/brand is exceeding your expectations and doing well it is best to use the momentum to further your brand’s impact. So, if you hope to introduce a brand of stand-up mixers, making a new domain called sweetmixers.com would not make your audience associate the website with your brand sweetpastry.com.

Subdomains Support Brand Recognition

Use your brand’s recognition to your advantage. In order to do this, make good work of subdomains. Set up a subdomain for each new product line you hope to introduce to your baking website sweetpastry.com.

For example, your new standup mixers can be marketed on a subdomain mixers.sweetpastry.com, similarly, you can do this for various products like recipe books, mixing bowls, and any other utensils.

This is a logical URL structure with the added benefit of a branding opportunity to help your audience connect the new products with your existing brand.

You can use this model in your own business as it suits your brand, its focus, and its recognition as your business expands. Subdomains enable you to use the existing reputation and popularity of your established brand to help propel new products and services to your audience while building your audience and customer base further.

2. Specific Domain Name

Let’s go back to our original domain example, sweetpastry.com. We’ve decided to switch gears from baking and go into fitness equipment. Perhaps your customer base has expanded waistlines now and need to lose a few pounds. You can easily switch focus by adding a subdomain to your website fitness.sweetpastry.com to encourage your users to get fit.

While this may seem convenient, fitness does not go hand and hand with the Baking Industry. Having it associated with your established brand is not cohesive from a marketing strategy nor does it sound logical.

In this scenario, it would be better to start an entirely new business around fitness with its own branded domain name. Because this business is a stand-alone it would be a best-case scenario to have its own unique website.

That way when customers are looking for fitness equipment, advice, products and apparel they can associate it with an independent brand. Again, you want to build brand awareness industry to industry when those two products are not directly associated.

3. A Generic Domain Name

We circle back to the Amazon.com example from earlier. Creating a generic domain name for a large umbrella company with various products and services can work great when adding new products and services.

Especially, if it takes off and becomes popular with strong brand awareness. Sometimes it works better when it’s not linked to a specific product or industry lead domain name like sweetpastry.com.

With a broad yet generic domain name, you can easily add subdomains when you want to add new products that you wish to stand alone and have specific content. As your brand grows it can become a go-to for all sorts of products and services in the same way Amazon has grown to be.

Alternatively, you can register new domain names for each new product launch but that can become costly and hard to manage. With a subdomain, you can easily add various mini-websites for each stand-alone product and simply explain it on the homepage or About page of your main website. Of course, you can have a catalogue and navigation menu that can lead your site visitors to the pages they wish to view or products that want to browse.

Amazon does this effortlessly with its website. On the other hand, Amazon also makes use of new domains for some of its brands like Wholefoods and Audible.

Subdomains though are great and can even make you rank high on search engines.

SEO Benefits of Subdomains

Your SEO game can get a boost by using subdomains. Why? Because when you use subdomains they lets search engines know exactly what each new page is about and enables them to be better indexed. Other boosts to SEO include:

Your niche/industry and branding authority are preserved.
You can link between various subdomains.
Your main domain will transfer domain authority to each subdomain.
Each subdomain will have a part to play, along with the primary domain, to boost on-page SEO and raise the bar.
Management of your website is easier with one domain and various subdomains and boosting SEO is made that much easier.

Conclusion

Pros for Subdomains include increased brand awareness with the ability to promote a variety of products associated with your brand. Plus, a website’s SEO is boosted when Googlebots crawl your original domain it hits the subdomains as well helping your index value. Your workload is infinitely less.

When it comes to using a new domain, it is best when you need to create entirely new business and brand for a product or service that is in a different industry or niche from your original website.

Whatever you decide, knowing the difference between the two is the best way to choose what will best serve your brand and business.

The post New Domain or Subdomain? What are the Pros and Cons? appeared first on Luxhosting.lu.