Web Hosting for Small Business

Choosing web hosting for small business by what the site does

Hosting is usually advertised on storage and bandwidth, because those are easy to print in big numbers. For an ordinary business site, neither is what will limit you. What decides which plan fits is what the site does, and who is on the hook for keeping its software patched.

What "shared" really means

Your site sits on a server alongside other sites and shares its processor, memory and disk. Think of an office building: your suite is yours, the lift and the heating are everybody's. It is the entry-level way to be online, tenants are kept separate from one another, and the trade-off is capacity, and it is the right answer for most small business websites. The trade-off is capacity, which is why hosts cap what any single site may consume.

When shared stops being enough

Sites rarely announce that they have outgrown a plan. They just get slower. The signals worth watching:

• Pages that are fine first thing and sluggish at your busiest hour.
• An admin area that lags when you edit, though the public site seems fine.
• Backups that start and never finish.
• Notices from the host about resource limits being hit.
• A checkout that takes noticeably longer than the rest of the site.

Before buying a bigger plan, check whether the site is the problem. Uncompressed images and a long plugin list are slow on any hardware, and a costlier server just makes them slow more expensively.

WordPress hosting

Shared hosting arranged around one piece of software, with core updates and caching handled for you so the version running your site does not quietly fall years behind. Worth paying for when the site runs WordPress and nobody wants to think about update notices. Not worth paying for otherwise: a hand-built site gains nothing from a plan tuned for a content management system it does not use.

Business hosting

More dedicated resources without you having to administer a server. The honest reason to be on it is that something specific pushed you there: a store, a genuinely busy site, or an application that slowed down where it used to be quick.

The poor reason is buying it before launch in case the site takes off. Moving up later is a straightforward job. Years of unused capacity is money you do not get back.

Get Your Web Hosting Plan Not sure which one? Ask us

Moving from another host

Migrating a website is mostly an exercise in doing things in the right order. The site itself copies across without much drama. What breaks, when something breaks, is email, and for a predictable reason: somebody rebuilt the DNS at the new host from scratch and left the mail records out.

Two rules prevent almost every migration disaster. Keep the old service running until the new one is proven, and never move the hosting and transfer the domain in the same session. Everything else is sequence.

The full order of operations, the pre-flight checks, how to test the new site before anything public points at it, and what to verify before you cancel the old account are on the website migration checklist. If the mailboxes are moving too, treat that as its own piece of work and follow email migration step by step rather than doing both in one afternoon.

If you are also moving the domain to a new registrar, do that as its own step rather than alongside the hosting change. How to transfer a domain explains the procedure and the order that keeps the site up.

Backups, and why a restore is the real test

Every host talks about backups. The specific questions are better ones. Are the copies kept somewhere other than the server they came from? Do they include the database as well as the files? How far back can you go, so an infection that sat unnoticed is still recoverable? Who can trigger a restore?

Then do the thing almost nobody does and restore one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a rumour, not a safety net. Malware scanning and cleanup sit alongside it on the website security page.

The mistakes that cost people money

• Buying on headline storage. Storage is the cheapest thing in the rack, which is why it is the number in the advertisement. Almost no small business site is limited by disk space.
• Letting a host lock you in. Site builders whose pages cannot be exported, control panels you cannot get a real backup out of, and bundled domains registered in the host's name all make leaving expensive. Ask before you buy: can I take a full copy of my site and database with me, and can I move my domain out.
• Having no tested restore. The moment you need a backup is the worst moment to find out it has been failing quietly for months.
• Confusing hosting with the domain. It gets the same thing paid for twice, and it leads people to cancel hosting expecting to keep the site, or change hosts expecting the domain to follow on its own.
• Renewing on autopilot. Introductory pricing is normal across the industry. What matters is the renewal, and that is worth checking once a year.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has been building and maintaining websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. Hosting was something we managed for our own clients long before we offered it on its own, which is why the help here is practical rather than scripted: choosing the plan that matches the site, setting up the DNS, copying an existing site across, and being reachable when something needs changing.

We are an independent authorised reseller for these products, not the operator of the underlying platform. What we add is the setup, the judgement about which plan you need, and a phone number in Buffalo. Call 716-771-2536, describe what you have now, or read the support pages first if you would rather.