Episode 13: Website Hosting Brisbane

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[00:00:03]  Saul: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Web Design Brisbane podcast This is episode number 13. And today's episode is entitled Website Hosting Brisbane. My name is Saul Edmonds, and as usual, I am joined by the lovely Gillian Smith.  

[00:00:16]  Gillian: Good morning, Saul and hello, everyone.

[00:00:18] Saul: Yes. Hello. We are the co-founders and creative directors of Roundhouse, the creative agency, a local business with a passion for helping our clients grow. Over to you, Gil.  

[00:00:26] Gillian: Okay, well, today, we'll be talking about our website hosting. Now, reliable web hosting is essential for your business. Today, we'll talk about website hosting for small businesses in Brisbane, Australia. We'll start with an overview of website hosting. And from there, go on to talk about what you need to look for when choosing a website hosting provider for your business. Let's get started. I can also give everyone an overview of what is website hosting.

[00:00:56]  Saul: Okay, so website hosting is essentially where your website resides. Everything has to reside somewhere your house needs to reside on a street in a suburb in a country so your website resides on some hosting that resides on a server on a computer, a server that is somewhere inside some institution that houses all sorts of data, not only websites, often, but a lot of them may be websites, but holds information and websites. One of those things. 

[00:01:35]  Gillian: So you got your website and separate to that is your website hosting the What about your (email)? 

[00:01:39] Saul: Yeah, so email is the same information to its, it also resides depending on the email service that you actually have. That also resides on a server somewhere. And then people retrieve that data, it sits on a server, people who go to view your website, then the information that comes from that server is sent to their computer, and they view it. And all depending on what is happening on the site that is sent back and forward to the server constantly to retrieve information and to send information.

[00:02:18]  Gillian: Is it ideal to have your emails hosted the same place that you have your website hosted?

[00:02:23]  Saul: Well, yeah, that's a really good question. And ideally, it can be at the same web hosting place if you want. But it shouldn't be on the same hosting. The main reason being that, I guess, in many ways was email is a different thing. Of course, all together, it does need to be separate in case there are issues with retrieving your emails, or any sort of problems that crop up probably more often, with emails and anything and people run their businesses and  most things by the email. So it's quite important.

[00:03:06]  Gillian: So what you should what should you look for when you're choosing a website hosting provider? 

[00:03:12]  Saul: Well, there's a lot of different factors that really come into play. If you're talking about security, stability, support, they're probably some of the main things, and then with your cost to is, of course, a factor for a lot of people. website hosting is  very competitive out there, too. So you should never as a general rule of (thumb), don't go with the cheapest one out there. The main reason is that even if the services pretty similar to some other hosting, especially 

[00:03:50]  Gillian: behind the scene matters,

[00:03:52]  Saul: yeah, behind the scenes matters, especially with support with people actually just being able to help you out. And once again, lack insurance. Yeah, it really comes into play when you need it. Unfortunately, and that's when it becomes apparent that you might not have the sort of support that you thought you actually heard. And that's never a good thing.

[00:04:14]  Gillian: We've put together a checklist of the key services and features that you should look for when choosing a website hosting service. So let's go through this. Okay, so the first one, of course, is server reliability and security. How important is to have that peace of mind security? Is there for your website and your emails? 

[00:04:34]  Saul: Right. It's really it's really almost, like we were saying before, too, is, in some ways, probably even more important for your email, because you've got, you've got personal communications, a lot of people run their business. Yeah, it is  equally as important. 

[00:04:52]  Gillian: Yeah, it is the life of life. And most businesses.

[00:04:54]  Saul:  Yeah, now, that's true. And then your website as well, that, especially with the sort of website, you have to, if you've got an ecommerce website, and you've got transactions that are happening through your website, as well, and products, and especially depending on the nature of that, it's, it's really quite important that you have really good server.

[00:05:18]  Gillian: So when you're looking for an email provider, email service provider, what should you look for their specific need to email?

[00:05:25]  Saul: Okay, so you've got a number of different options out there for email you a lot of web hosting, when you get hosting setup, if you have something cool see panel hosting, you will automatically have email options in there just to set that up, as well, which  can often be quite okay. But there are other options out there to one is provided by Google (inaudible), Google Gsuite, and also by my Microsoft, as well. So both those two options come with a suite of other services to being able to organize your calendar, and file storage and a whole host of other things online, they're really good options as well, because they're very secure, and those two services have very high level of security and a range of other options that you don't usually get.

[00:06:27]  Gillian: Are there any registration or maintenance costs that people need to know about when it comes to website hosting?

[00:06:35]  Saul: A registration in? So if you're going to not necessarily registration, but when it comes to maintenance. No, not really,  unless things like that are specified when you're getting hosting, it's usually just built into your monthly fee, the only thing I'm going to registration comes with registering a domain, or then if you're going to be yearly these days now, everyone really needs to have security certificates for their website. 

[00:07:12]  Gillian:  that's called an SSL certificate.

[00:07:14] Saul: Yeah, that's right. And so SSL certificates used to be really the province of ecommerce sites only. But Google made it the requirement that all sites now have to show that they're secure, and that they have a security certificate. So you'll have to renew those yearly now as well for all websites. 

[00:07:41]  Gillian: So with regard to your hosting, one thing you need to look out for is any account limitations. So that would be going to say about account limitations in that regard.

[00:07:51]  Saul: Yeah, very true. There's account limitations will be things that are either set by you that you don't. There's always a default, say amount of hard drive space, all depending on the sort of plan you have, the hosting provider will already set for you certain file, download and upload limitations, or you can sometimes set that if they give you the ability to have that as unlimited, and that also goes for emails, too, if you're setting up the emails within the hosting, and you're not using something like Google or Microsoft email, then you will also have the ability to set like unlimited email accounts. Not that anyone ever needs unlimited email account. 

[00:08:42]  Gillian: what would happen in a situation where your website suddenly gets an enormous amount of hits? Is that going to impact on anything? 

[00:08:50]  Saul: Yeah, depending on the hosting, it will,  if you had your bandwidth for your website traffic, which refers to the amount of people really looking at it, there's a certain amount of data that's on every page of your website. So if you add up if a person views, page one, page two, page three, and that's a certain amount of information, then times, pathetically 100,000 people, and that amount is way more than what you have been allocated on your hosting, then your site's going to crash. And (inaudible), there's going to be some level of problem unless you're hosting has the ability, which some do to automatically scale up. But that depends on the sort of hosting you have.

[00:09:51]  Gillian: Okay, well,  what should people be on the lookout for with a web site hosting provider in terms of customer service, 

[00:09:58] Saul: I think it's always a really good practice and this doesn't necessarily mean that your customer service that it has to be in Australia. I mean, it's a great, it's probably, in some respects, a really good idea if you have a website in Australia to have it hosted in Australia, but it's not a requirement. There's plenty of great services overseas and in my mind having if you had to weigh up between having a hosting provider here in Australia, that had, customer service, or not so good customer service, and somewhere overseas that had great customer service, meaning, so if you're looking for what that would mean, I would say even giving it a little bit of a trial just to see how quickly people respond. That's usually the thing because a lot of places won't even have a call centre like some will. But it'll be pretty hard to find their phone number 

[00:11:02]  Gillian: If you do want that 24/7 support when it comes to website and email. 

[00:11:05]  Saul: And ideally good response time is a good one to a good response time, and people willing to willing to sort of try to get to the heart of the problem with you is a key one I think

[00:11:17]  Gillian: and finally, Saul, have regarding ecommerce website hosting, have you got any special advice or tips there?

[00:11:23] Saul: Okay, so ecommerce website hosting, too, is like normal hosting, except for the fact that you would probably have other considerations in terms of the amount of bandwidth you would want to. Especially you've got a really big store, generally the size of hosting and how robust your hosting is, and extra levels of security are important factor but then if you've got something like Shopify website, or some hosted solution, and that won't even come into play, because they've got their own hosting as part of it. And that's about it for today, guys, thank you so much for listening. Before we go. Please don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback. Also, if you'd like to read the transcript of this episode, please visit our website at roundhouse.cc forward slash web-design. We're on a journey to help local Brisbane businesses grow their opportunities online and exceed their goals. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.