What the heck does that mean (and do I even need it)?

Cloud Hosting

Technically, all web hosting is cloud hosting, because your website isn’t sitting on your computer at home, but is in the cloud and can be accessed by people around the world using the power of the internet.

However, what people typically mean by cloud hosting is that your website isn’t dependent on just one server. Instead, it’s load-balanced, which means that your website can draw resources from a group of different servers. As well as better reliability, it also means your website pulls the resources it needs during busy periods, so it stays fast and online. Some hosts charge extra for the resources you use; we don’t, keeping it as one fixed price so you always know you’re paying the same.

At Lyrical Host, our platform is cloud hosting and configured as such that your visitors are served your content from a location near them, regardless of where they are in the world. This means that you, your visitors and any virtual assistants or team members you hire, can travel the globe freely and enjoy your website or work on it just the same as if you were at home.

Shared Hosting vs VPS (Virtual Private Servers) vs Dedicated Servers

Back in the old days, shared hosting had a bad reputation as many budget hosts bought cheap hardware and overloaded it with websites. This inevitably caused everything to run slow, and your neighbor’s busy spike could take your website down as well. When people say to avoid shared hosting, this is what they’re thinking of.

These days, standards are much higher and technology and networks have come a long way. While there are still some budget hosts out there that cut corners, a high quality shared hosting environment, like the one we have, doesn’t have the problems of the old days (we use premium hardware and don’t overload it for a start!).

It’s always the best option if you aren’t super technical. Not only is it much easier for you to manage – no time or sysadmin skills needed! – our platform is designed to scale and allow for your website (or your neighbours’) going viral. We’ve seen customers featured on national TV shows and their websites haven’t skipped a beat despite thousands of simultaneous viewers browsing around. Meanwhile, there are many people at other hosts who have launched a new product or service and seen their – expensively hosted – website go down because the resources didn’t scale.

You can read more about why that doesn’t happen with Lyrical Host-hosted sites and how our scaling works on our Platforms & Technologies page.

When you choose a more technical hosting option, such as a VPS or dedicated server, the resources your website has access to are far more restricted. This means if your site gets super popular, you invent the new labubu, or you just have a random busy spike from a viral Pinterest pin, it’s likely that your site will run slow or fall over.

If you wouldn’t know where to start investigating what was causing a RAM or CPU spike on a virtual server and be comfortable resolving it yourself, we would not recommend you look at VPS hosting.

This is because many hosts, even those offering what they call managed VPS, will simply tell you to upgrade instead of investigating and fixing the problem for you. The vast majority of the time, this means you keep the problem and ending up paying more for it. Your website goes down again, they tell you to upgrade again, and so on. We have people move to us all the time for this reason, and their hosting costs are sometimes in the several hundred dollars per month range, whereas they’re immediately back on a two figure plan with us and don’t have to worry about downtime or technical fixes.

When you don’t have the in-depth technical knowledge, these kinds of hosting issues require you to hire a person to fix. Social media groups and AI tools can’t help you and you would need to trust someone with your login details to diagnose issues, and be assured that they had the skills to fix them.

A dedicated server requires the highest level of technical knowledge and understanding of all hosting options. It means you have to manage security patches and other software updates, your running costs are a lot higher in terms of both hardware and software, and it can easily work out as a less than effective solution. Hosts will either expect you (or rather be expecting your technical team) to be fixing your own tech support problems or charging you four/five figures a month, and there’s no limit as to how much it can cost to run your own dedicated server.

The specs and performance can actually work out worse than a high quality shared server due to the overall costs involved, and it also means a higher negative environmental impact.

What To Ask A Potential Web Host

What’s important to ask

✔ What happens if my website goes over bandwidth (or inode) limits?

✔ Will my site will stay online during high traffic spikes?

✔ Am I expected to do any server management or software patching myself?

✔ What security features are built-in as standard?

✔ Is email included, and if so how many mailboxes and what size?

✔ Are emails counted as part of my web space storage, or are they separate?

✔ How does your support help me if my website gets hacked? Are there any extra costs involved?

✔ Is domain privacy free?

✔ Do any of my services renew at a different price?

✔ What WordPress help and support do you offer?

✔ Does your support team have sales targets?

✔ What other costs could be involved or come up for me?

What’s not important to ask

𐄂 Where are your servers located?

If you’re looking at good hosts, there will be no human-discernible server speed performance differences no matter where you are in the world. You want hosting that’s fast everywhere, because you have billions of people you want to help – not millions.

𐄂 What are the server specs? Do you use xyz server software?

Specific server specs or specific keywords/names of technologies aren’t going to be super helpful. Most things are either industry-standard and every host uses them so it won’t help you, and for the rest every host builds their platform differently and uses different combinations of tech stacks to create their own unique mix, so looking for something specific won’t clue you in. There isn’t one ring to rule them all, just different stacks.

A good rule of thumb: If you’re told to ask (or think you should ask) specific technical questions but you don’t know what they mean or how they relate to your website or goals, chances are they’re not important for what you need.

Domain Privacy

What is it? Domain privacy hides your contact details from being displayed when someone does a lookup of your domain name. It’s essential if you want to make sure your domain isn’t revealing your phone number and address publicly on the internet.

Do you need it? Highly recommended so your personal details are safe.

What to check: Any good domain registrar will offer it for free, like we do. Be careful of companies offering “free” or very cheap domains that add a cost for privacy. It usually works out more expensive than registering or renewing the domain at the regular price!

SSL Certificate

What is it? An SSL certificate provides an encrypted connection for your website’s visitors. This prevents third parties from intercepting sensitive information like email addresses and payment details. When an SSL certificate is active, visitors will see “https://” and a green padlock icon in their browser’s address bar when visiting your website.

Do you need it? Yes, it’s a must-have for every website (not just ecommerce sites). You don’t need to pay for any SSL certificate management services either; there’s very little work for that and your host should do it for free.

What to check: That it’s free with your host. Ideally you want a certificate that is self-renewing every three months for better security.

Premium DNS

What is it? Also known as Managed DNS, Premium DNS can comprise a variety of different services, including DDoS protection, load-balancing, and distributed content delivery (so people are served your content from a location near them instead of a server on the other side of the world).

Do you need it? No – your host should include these features as standard as part of their hosting plans. If they don’t, it’s a concern that there may be other hidden costs too.

What to check: That the host and hosting plan you’re choosing includes these features as standard, rather than at an extra cost.

Caching

What is it? A way of temporarily storing content to create a faster experience for people visiting your website. Caching is typically handled by your web host or a plugin, so as long as you have the correct settings/info, it’s broadly a set-and-forget function.

Do you need it? Some hosts have their own caching, otherwise you can install a (free or paid) plugin/service to handle it.

What to check: Always check with your host first, as if you install a caching plugin or use an additional service on top of your host’s caching, it can conflict and cause your site to slow down. At Lyrical Host, we have our own fully-optimized caching that is fully tailored to our platform and therefore is more effective than generic third party caching. However, if you prefer to use a different caching solution, our support team can disable our caching for you – just raise a ticket.

Web Space

What is it? This is the amount of virtual space your website files use, similarly to how the files on your computer or phone use space there. It’s most commonly measured in GB (gigabytes). It may also be referred to as disk space or web storage.

What to check: Find out if the host includes email storage as part of your web storage, as otherwise you may end up with a lot less than you think. Some hosts even include your hosting control panel software in your space limits, so always check to see what to expect.

Bandwidth

What is it? Every time someone visits your web page, they’re using data. This is typically things like viewing images, videos, potentially downloading content, and so on. The bigger each of your page sizes is and the heavier your content, the more bandwidth each visitor uses. Text uses the least bandwidth, while high resolution videos and big downloads can use the most. This is one of the reasons why, even if you aren’t personally using or updating your website in a given month, it costs hosting companies money to keep it online for you.

What to check: Make sure the host doesn’t take your website offline for hitting your bandwidth limit in a month – all good hosts will warn you and work with you before taking such a drastic step. At Lyrical Host, we also have support on hand to advise, and a bunch of self-help content on how to reduce your bandwidth use, so upgrading is the last step rather than the first.

Inodes

What is it? Inodes are a way of structuring and organizing data, including telling systems where to find files, how big the files are and so on. The more files you have for your website, the more inodes.

What to check: Some web hosts use inodes as a measure of resource usage. This is generally because people are looking at web space and bandwidth limits, (a more common and standard way to price hosting), and don’t realize that inodes could be a limiting factor, so it makes the hosting look cheaper or better value on the surface. Even with unlimited space and bandwidth,  if a host charges for inodes, it means you could end up paying extra costs you weren’t expecting.

Most hosts don’t charge for inode usage (we don’t), so double check with the host you’re considering.

RAM & CPU

What are they? Features of web servers essential to performance and delivering your website to visitors, broadly relating to power, speed, and the ability to handle traffic.

What to check: If you’re using shared hosting, you don’t need to worry about these because they are professionally managed for you. If you have a VPS (virtual private server) or dedicated server, RAM and CPU usage are the most common reasons your website is likely to run slow or be inaccessible, especially at peaks of high usage or if plugins are going rogue with resources.

How Much Do You Really Need To Know About Hosting?

As long as you’re buying the right type of hosting for your needs, and you’re choosing a company that provides human, non-techy support and help, you’re all set.

Think of it like owning and driving a car – you need to know some basics (like the info on this page), but you don’t need to be a mechanic. Instead, you want to know you have a mechanic on hand you can trust to do a great job when you need it and charge you a reasonable price. That’s the role of your hosting company.

Tech is only ever as good as the people behind it, which is far more of a limiting factor. Customer service is an excellent indicator of what the company prioritizes – the quality of the responses is more important than the speed, as many companies are keen to have their “tech support” sell you a “solution.”

Reputation and your relationship with them are the most important things to you. While the technical aspects of the service are of course essential, knowing you have someone who cares about any issues or questions you have and that they provide great advice, is key to your success (and eliminating tech frustrations and headaches).

While price is always an important consideration, be careful you’re identifying any hidden or future costs upfront, as often things don’t actually work out as cheap as they initially appear. See our blog post, Domain & Hosting Pricing Tricks: Things Your Web Host Doesn’t Want You To Know, for a comprehensive list.

Web Hosting You Can Understand

Backed by friendly human support. Find out more about our hosting services, and see what our control panel and webmail look like.