Hosting

Hosting is the service that keeps your website files on a computer that is always on and always connected, so that when somebody types your address the pages are sent to their phone. You rent that space, usually monthly or yearly. A website without hosting is a set of files on somebody’s laptop. It is the least visible thing you buy for your website and one of the few that can take the whole business offline.

In short

• Hosting is the always-on computer your website lives on.
• Domain, hosting and website are three separate things, often bought separately.
• Where the server is affects how fast the site feels to Filipino visitors.
• Maintenance is not part of hosting unless somebody agreed to do it.

Three things people confuse

• Domain is the address, like yourbusiness.ph. Rented yearly from a registrar.
• Hosting is the space the files sit in. Rented from a hosting company.
• The website is the files themselves: the design, the pages, the photos.

They are three separate purchases and they can each come from a different supplier. That is normal. What is not normal, and what causes real trouble, is not knowing who holds which. If your developer disappears and nobody can name the registrar or the host, recovering a site becomes slow and sometimes impossible.

Write down all three, in your own records, with the login details in your own name.

What happens when somebody visits your site

The sequence takes well under a second when everything is right, and every step in it is a place things go wrong.

Somebody types your address. Their phone asks the DNS, the internet’s address book, which server that domain points at. DNS answers with an address. The phone opens a connection to that server, and the two agree an encrypted link using your SSL certificate, which is what makes the connection a secure one.

The server then either sends a ready-made page or builds one on the spot by running code and asking a database for your content. The phone receives it and starts drawing, then goes back for images, fonts and scripts, sometimes dozens of them, before the page looks finished.

That is why hosting problems show up in odd ways. A DNS mistake makes the site unreachable while everything on the server is fine. An expired certificate throws a security warning on a perfectly healthy site. A slow database makes the first part of the page take seconds while the images arrive instantly.

The kinds of hosting

• Shared hosting. Your site sits on one server with many others. It is the common starting point and it is fine for a brochure site with modest traffic. The trade is that a busy neighbour can slow you down.
• VPS. A reserved slice of a server. More predictable, more control, and it expects somebody who knows what they are doing.
• Managed WordPress or managed hosting. The host handles updates, backups, caching and security for the platform specifically. More work for the host, less for you, and usually the right answer for a business without technical staff.
• Cloud hosting. Capacity that expands with demand. Useful for stores with seasonal spikes, which in the Philippines means the double date sales.
• Static hosting. The pages are built in advance and served as finished files, with no database and nothing to run per visit. Very fast and very hard to break into, and it suits sites whose content changes on a schedule rather than constantly.

Where the server is, and why it matters

Data has to travel. A page served from a machine in Singapore reaches a phone in Manila faster than one served from Frankfurt, simply because the distance is shorter. On fibre the difference is small. On mobile data with a weak signal, it is the difference between a page that appears and a page somebody gives up on.

For a business selling to Filipino customers, a server in Singapore or elsewhere in Asia is usually the right choice. If your host is in Europe or the United States, a CDN, a content delivery network, copies your images and files to servers around the world and serves each visitor from the nearest one. That recovers most of the difference and is worth having either way.

Page speed is also something Google measures directly and uses in ranking, so this is not only a comfort question. It is part of SEO.

What hosting does not include

This is where most businesses get caught. Hosting keeps your files available. It does not, unless somebody specifically agreed to it, do any of the following.

• Updates. WordPress, its plugins and its themes release updates constantly, many of them security fixes. An unpatched plugin is the most common way a small business site gets compromised.
• Backups. Some hosts keep them, some keep them for a few days, some do not keep them at all. Find out which, and find out whether anybody has ever tested restoring one.
• Security monitoring. Noticing that something is wrong before a customer does.
• Fixing things. When the site breaks, the host will tell you the server is fine. They are usually right, and it does not help you.
• Email. Hosting a website and running your email are different services, even when sold together. Moving one can break the other if nobody checks. Email hosting has its own records and its own migration.

Most sites that go down were not attacked by anyone in particular. They were left alone for a year and then something expired, broke or was found by an automated scan looking for exactly that.

Words you will hear, and what they mean

• DNS. The system that turns your domain into the server address. Changes to it can take a while to reach everyone, which is why a moved site can look live for you and broken for a colleague.
• Nameservers. The specific DNS servers your domain points at. Whoever controls these controls where the domain resolves.
• SSL certificate. What encrypts the connection and produces the padlock. Should renew automatically. Usually free now.
• Bandwidth. How much data your visitors download in a month. Only a concern for image-heavy or very busy sites.
• Caching. Storing a ready-made copy of a page so the server does not rebuild it for every visitor. One of the cheapest speed improvements available.
• Staging. A private copy of the site for testing changes before they go live.
• Uptime. The share of time the site is reachable.

What to ask your host

Five questions, and the answers should be immediate.

1. Where is the server? Asia is better for Filipino visitors.
2. How often are backups taken, how far back do they go, and how do I restore one? A backup nobody has tested is a hope.
3. Is there an SSL certificate, and does it renew automatically? Browsers warn visitors when it is missing, and expired certificates are a common and entirely avoidable embarrassment.
4. Who applies updates? If the answer is nobody, that is a decision somebody made by accident.
5. What is the support response time, and in which hours? A host answering only during European office hours is not much use at eight in the evening in Cebu.