Managed Hosting is when the service provider handles everything involved with setting up and maintaining your website.
Here at Sandhills Geeks, we provide managed hosting.
Un-Managed Hosting
With regular or un-managed hosting, you will start from scratch and manage every aspect of getting your website online.
When selecting a hosting plan for your business, it is important to understand what you are purchasing. Most of the low cost hosting plans ($2-$6 / month) will provide nothing more than shared access to server space and a cPanel to set everything up.
cPanels give you access to most of what you need to build your website and put it online. However, there is a lot of technical work involved.
Before purchasing an un-managed hosting plan, you need to consider everything involved:
DNS (Domain Name System)
DNS is how you assign your domain names to your server IP address, cache your website through content delivery networks, set up your emails, and more. You will need to edit the nameservers and TXT entries to make sure your domain points to the root folder in your file system so when someone goes to yourdomain.com, it loads your website.
File Manager and FTP
This is how you upload all the files for your website. Using the file manager will take a long time and you may miss some files while manually uploading them. It is better to download FileZilla or something similar to use FTP and upload everything quicker.
Databases
You need databases to collect emails, register users, process orders, create posts, save comments, and anything else involving data collection.
Backups
You want to back up your website daily. It is good practice to have redundancies in place so that if something happens to your backup you have another one located somewhere else. Here at SHG, we backup your website every day. We store one version on our eco-friendly servers, one locally, and one with a cloud file hosting provider.
Security
Data breaches are becoming more complex and are happening more often. Security is extremely important especially if you are running an eCommerce store. Firewalls, DDoS protection, and bot management are just some protections you will need to implement.
At Sandhills Geeks, we block access from countries that are known for malicious actions. Our CDN constantly monitors for incoming attacks and threats. We provide SSL certificates that renew monthly. Your business and customers are safe on our platform.
Speed
Website speed directly affects search rankings. To keep load times low, you need proper caching, inlined critical CSS and Javascript, image optimization, enhanced server RAM, and a CDN with multiple locations to serve your site.
At Sandhills Geeks we do all of this and more. We guarantee your website receives an A rating on GTmetrix.
Managed Hosting With Sandhills Geeks
Our Managed Hosting Business Plan is $15. $22 for eCommerce.
We handle everything involved with setting up and maintaining your website.
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