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Web Hosting for Architects
An architecture practice publishes larger files than almost any other business, and shows them to fewer people. That combination is why so many practice websites feel slow, and why web hosting for architects is rarely what needs fixing. The answer is in what you upload, not what you pay for.
The file straight out of the software
Here is the usual sequence. The render comes back from the visualisation software at 6000 pixels wide as a 24MB PNG. Somebody drags it onto the project page because it looks correct there. Twelve of those go up over a year, and now the portfolio takes half a minute to open on a phone in a car park.
Nothing is broken. The server is doing exactly what it was asked to do, which is to send 200MB of photographs to somebody who wanted to see whether you have done a school before. That is the whole problem, and it is entirely fixable without changing hosts.
Why architects hit this harder than anyone else
- Your source material starts enormous. A render, a scanned drawing and a professional photograph are all far bigger than a shop's product photo ever gets.
- The images are the product. You cannot answer this by using fewer of them, the way a plumber can.
- Quality is the point. Compressing a render into mush is a worse outcome than a slow page, so the usual advice of "just squash it" lands badly here.
- The audience is small and specific. You are not chasing volume, so the traffic is never what strains anything. The weight is.
PNG is worth singling out because it is the default export in a lot of design software and it is the wrong format for a photographic image. PNG was built to keep flat colour and hard edges exact, which makes it excellent for a line drawing or a logo and enormously wasteful for a render full of sky and glass. The same image as a good JPEG or WebP is a fraction of the size and looks the same on screen.
Get the 24MB PNGs off your project pages
Send us your practice site and we will tell you which renders are being shipped at full export size, and what they should be instead. If the hosting you have is already right, we will say so.
Preparing an image so it stays worth looking at
This is a five minute habit, not a project. Do it once per image, at the point you would otherwise have uploaded, and the site never gets slow in the first place.
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Decide the real display size first
Look at how wide the image actually appears on your own project page. A full-width hero is rarely more than about 2000 pixels wide on a large screen. A three-across grid thumbnail is a few hundred. Everything above that number is being sent and then thrown away by the browser.
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Resize before you compress
Halving the dimensions removes roughly three quarters of the pixels. No compression setting comes close to that, and resizing does not degrade what is left. Do this first and the compression step barely has to work.
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Export as JPEG or WebP, not PNG
Photographs and renders belong in a photographic format. Keep PNG or SVG for line drawings, plan diagrams and your practice mark, where flat areas and crisp edges are the point.
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Check it at full size on a real screen
Open the exported file at 100 percent and look at the sky, any gradient, and any brushed metal. Those are where over-compression shows first. If they are clean, you are done.
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Keep the master somewhere else
The website is not your archive. Keep the original export in the project folder and treat what is on the server as a copy made for the web. The website backups page covers what the site copy is and is not good for.
If a client or a jury genuinely needs the high resolution file, link to a download rather than putting it in the page. One person a month getting a 24MB file on purpose is fine. Everyone getting it by accident is not.
Project pages that work for a client and for a jury
Two very different people read your project pages, and most practice sites are built for only one of them.
The prospective client is trying to answer a narrow question. Have you done this building type, at roughly this size, in roughly this place, and did it go well. They want the type, the scale, the location and something that reads as evidence rather than as a mood board.
The awards jury, the journalist and the academic want credits, dates, consultants, materials and a drawing or two. They will read further than the client will, and they are the ones who cite you.
One page can serve both
- Put the plain facts near the top in words, not only in a caption. Type of building, completion year, location, and your role on it.
- Say what your role actually was. Design architect, architect of record, interiors only, competition entry. Vagueness here reads as overclaiming to anyone in the profession.
- Credit the consultants and the photographer by name. It costs you nothing, it is expected, and it is how other people find the page.
- Put the images and drawings below the facts. Somebody scrolling a phone should not have to travel through four renders to learn where the building is.
Writing the facts as ordinary text matters for a second reason. Words inside an image are invisible to search, and a lot of practice sites put the entire project description into a beautifully typeset graphic. If the only place your building type appears is inside a JPEG, nobody searching for it will reach you.
Unbuilt and competition work belongs on the site. Label it as unbuilt and nobody minds. Leave it ambiguous and somebody eventually assumes you claimed a building you did not build.
Drawing sets, and what should not be on a public server
Architects handle documents other trades never touch, and the instinct to publish them needs a second look. A full construction set on a public URL is a security document as much as a design one. It shows door hardware, alarm panel locations, riser routes and structure for a building that people occupy.
There is also the ownership question. Drawings usually remain your intellectual property even after the client has paid, and a public set is a set anybody can trace, reissue or feed to something else. That is not an argument against showing your work. It is an argument for showing selected sheets rather than the set.
- Publish a plan or a section because it explains the idea, not because it was in the folder.
- Strip the title block detail you do not want circulating, and flatten before export.
- Ask the client before publishing anything for a secure, residential or institutional building. Some will say no, and that is easier to hear before it is online.
- Send live document exchange through the channel it belongs in rather than a folder on the website. A file dropped in a public directory has no expiry and no record of who took it.
If your practice needs clients to send you large files, that is a job for a file transfer service with a link that expires, not for an upload form bolted onto the website. Ask us and we will say the same thing rather than sell you storage.
We will rework a portfolio of full size uploads
Resizing a hundred renders one at a time is the job most practices never get to. AldoMedia has done this for Western New York firms since 1999, and it is a one off with a fixed end.
Most of your traffic is somebody looking for a job
This surprises practices the first time they look at it properly. A firm of any size gets a steady stream of graduates, part twos, interns and experienced staff reading the site, and they read further than clients do. They look at the people page, the culture, the recent work and whether anything has been posted in the last year.
It changes what belongs on the site. A careers page that says what you are actually looking for beats a generic address. A people page with faces and roles does more recruiting than a values statement. A projects list that stopped in a year that is now well behind you tells a candidate the practice went quiet, whether or not it did.
It also changes what you need from email. Portfolios arrive as attachments and they are large by definition, so a careers address that bounces a big message is a real cost. Whether that lives in a mailbox on your hosting or in Microsoft 365 is a decision worth making deliberately, along with who else can see that inbox when the person who owns it is on site.
None of this asks anything unusual of a server. It asks that somebody updates the site more than once every three years, which is a habit, not a product.
Web hosting for architects, and one word to be careful with
Take the hosting question first, because it is easy. A practice website is a set of pages that change a few times a year and are read by a small, deliberate audience. On weight it is demanding. On traffic it is one of the quietest things you can put on a server.
Shared hosting is the right product, and the entry tier is usually enough once the images are prepared. If somebody is selling you a large plan for a portfolio site, the honest reading is that they are selling you room to keep uploading 24MB PNGs. That is a more expensive way to have the same slow page.
- You do not need a bigger plan because your images are big. You need smaller images. The plan is downstream of that.
- You do not need a content delivery network for a practice with a local client base and a few hundred visitors a week.
- You do not need a security product for a site with no logins and no payments, beyond the basics every site should have.
- You may well need somebody to rework an existing portfolio of full-size uploads, which is a one-off job with a fixed end.
The word itself
This is the part worth slowing down on, and it is not a hosting matter. Architect and architecture are protected in a way most trades' titles are not, and the rules differ by state. A designer who is not licensed, or who is licensed elsewhere and not where the work is, has to be careful how the practice, the services and the individuals are described on a public website. Firm naming and the seal have their own requirements.
The safe habit is to describe exactly what you do and who is licensed where, in plain words, and to have your own adviser or your state board confirm the wording before it goes live. That is genuinely the whole advice. We will build and host whatever page you approve, but we are not the right people to tell you what you may call yourself, and neither is anyone else who sells hosting.
Where spending more on hosting does make sense: you carry very large media on the site rather than linking to it, you run a busy journal or research archive, or you have taken on an internal application that needs to sit somewhere. Volume of projects is not a reason.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and a portfolio site with a hundred untouched exports on it is familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and if the plan you are on is already the right one we will tell you that and talk about the images instead.
If the practice site was built by somebody you have lost contact with, the order in which to get control of the domain, the files and the email is on the taking over a website page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on.
Common questions
Architecture practice website questions
How large should a project image be before I upload it?
Work back from how wide it appears on the page. A full-width hero is rarely more than about 2000 pixels wide even on a large monitor, and a grid thumbnail is a few hundred. Resize to that first, then export as JPEG or WebP rather than PNG. Renders and photographs in PNG are the single most common cause of a slow practice site.
Should I put full drawing sets on the website?
Selected sheets, yes. The full construction set, no. A complete set on a public URL shows structure, services and access detail for an occupied building, and it is a document anybody can copy and reissue. Publish the plan or section that explains the idea, and ask the client first for anything secure, residential or institutional.
Do I need a big hosting plan for a portfolio with hundreds of images?
Almost never. Once the images are prepared properly a whole portfolio is a modest amount of storage, and the traffic is low by the standards of any server. Buying a larger plan so you can keep uploading full-size exports gives you the same slow page at a higher price.
Can I call the practice an architecture firm if I am not licensed?
Check with your state board or your own adviser before the page goes live, because the rules on those words are strict and they differ by state. The practical habit is to describe what you actually do, say plainly who is licensed and where, and get the wording confirmed. A hosting company is not the right source for that answer, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Why does my site get more job applications than enquiries?
Because for most practices that is who reads it. Graduates and experienced staff go through a firm's site far more thoroughly than a prospective client does. Treat it as a recruiting document as well as a portfolio: keep the people page current, say what you are hiring for, and make sure the careers address can take a large portfolio attachment without bouncing it.
Related
Taking Over a Website
Getting control of the domain, the files and the email when the original builder is gone.
How a handover worksWebsite Backups
What a host's backup covers, what it does not, and why it is not your project archive.
Read about backupsEvery trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Opposite Office, Benedikt Hartl, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Get the portfolio down to a sensible weight
Send us the address of your practice site and we will tell you what is making it slow and whether the plan you pay for has anything to do with it.
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Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.