Photographers
The entire product is the gallery, so the site is heavy by definition and every megabyte has to be earned.
Photographers hosting
Los Angeles, CA
Web Hosting in Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles runs on entertainment, design and an enormous service economy, and almost every business in it sells with pictures. Sites here are heavier than sites anywhere else, so web hosting in Los Angeles, CA lives or dies on how well it carries that weight.
We are not in Los Angeles. AldoMedia is in Buffalo, New York, and there is no California office, no local number and nobody who can drive over. Setup, migration and support all happen remotely, which for hosting is simply how it works.
In this city, the portfolio is the website
Work here gets judged on how it looks, so the site is built to show work. Photographers, designers, studios, salons, contractors, restaurants and clinics all lead with images, and most of them lead with a lot of images. That is the right instinct. It is also the thing that quietly ruins the page.
A camera today produces a file several megabytes wide. Drop twenty of those into a gallery without resizing them and you have a page that weighs more than a short video, on a phone, over mobile data, for somebody deciding in four seconds whether you are worth an enquiry.
What is actually slow
Almost never the hosting plan. The plan is handing out files as fast as it can. The problem is that it has been asked to hand out sixty megabytes of them. Buying a bigger plan makes a heavy page slightly less slow. Making the page lighter fixes it.
- Resize photographs before they go up. Nothing on a web page needs to be the width of the original file.
- Export in a modern image format. The same picture at the same quality can land at a fraction of the size.
- Load the gallery as the visitor scrolls, rather than all of it before anything appears.
- Show a small selection on the homepage and put the full body of work behind a link.
- Test on a phone on mobile data, away from the office wifi, which flatters everything.
The test worth running is simple. Open your own site on your phone, on cellular, and count. If the first image has not appeared by four, neither has your visitor.
Find out what your site weighs
Send us the address. We will tell you how heavy the homepage is, how it loads on a phone, and which images are doing the damage. If it is already in good shape, we will tell you that instead.
Fewer pictures is not the answer
This is where advice usually goes wrong. Somebody tells a business that sells on appearance to cut its gallery in half, and the site gets faster and stops working. The point of the site was the work.
You can keep the images. What you cannot keep is the habit of uploading them untouched. A gallery of forty properly prepared photographs can load faster than a homepage carrying six raw ones, and it looks identical to the person viewing it.
The other half of it is caching, which means the server hands over a finished page instead of rebuilding one from a database on every single visit. On a site with a large gallery that difference is not subtle. Both of these are settings and habits, not products, and neither costs anything extra on a normal plan.
If the site runs on WordPress, which most portfolio sites do, this is worth reading alongside the notes on WordPress hosting, because a stack of image and gallery plugins is often doing four jobs where one would do.
Why a Buffalo company, for a Los Angeles business
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan.
Hosting is not a local service. Your website does not live in Los Angeles now, and it will not afterwards. It lives in a data centre somewhere, and which state that building sits in makes no practical difference to somebody loading your page in California. The distance between a visitor and a server is measured in milliseconds and is swamped by everything else on the page, starting with the images.
So what you are actually choosing is not a location. It is who picks up when the site is down, when the renewal notice looks wrong, or when email stops arriving on a Tuesday morning. That varies enormously between companies and has nothing to do with the map.
We are in Buffalo, we answer on Eastern time, and we have built websites since 1999. Eastern is three hours ahead of Pacific, which mostly works in your favour. We are already at a desk when your morning starts, and we answer email before that. If you need somebody to appear at your office this afternoon, we are the wrong choice and we will say so plainly.
The genuinely local part of your online presence is your Google Business Profile, and it is free. Get that right before you spend money anywhere else.
We will handle the move
Copy, test, switch the domain, keep the mail records intact so nothing stops arriving. You carry on working while it happens, and afterwards you have somebody to call.
Moving a site here without losing the email
Most people who contact us are not launching something new. They are leaving something. A host that got slow, a developer who stopped replying, a plan that tripled at renewal, or a site somebody else built and nobody now has the login for.
A move is not risky if it is done in the right order. Copy everything to the new server first. Test it there while the old site is still serving visitors. Only then point the domain across. Done that way nothing goes dark, because the old server keeps answering until every visitor's connection catches up.
The part that goes wrong is nearly always email. Somebody rebuilds the DNS from scratch on the new host and leaves the mail records out, and the business loses a day or more of enquiries before anybody notices, because nothing looks broken. Write the existing records down before touching anything. The order of operations is set out on the website migration page, and the email side has its own notes on email migration.
If you have inherited a site and do not have the logins, that is a solvable problem and a common one. It is worth sorting out before you need to change something urgently.
Where web hosting in Los Angeles, CA gets overpriced
Most hosting companies leave this part out, so here it is plainly.
- A large plan for a small site. A portfolio, a services page and a contact form is not a demanding thing to host. Shared hosting covers it comfortably.
- Extra storage, when the real problem is that nothing was resized before it went up.
- A security add-on that duplicates something the plan already includes. Ask what is already there before adding anything.
- A website builder subscription for a site nobody has edited in two years.
- A separate backup service, when backups may already be part of what you pay for.
Spending more genuinely makes sense in a few cases. If the site takes bookings or payments, if it carries a very large media library, if downtime costs you work the same day, or if you are running several sites from one account, a bigger tier earns its money.
Volume of visitors on its own almost never justifies it. A page that has been made light will absorb a good day without noticing, and a page that has not will struggle on a quiet one.
Trades whose sites carry the most weight here
Three kinds of business that live or die on how their website looks, each with a page of its own.
Med spas
Before and after images sell the treatment, and they have to load fast while handling enquiries carefully.
Med spas hostingAuto repair shops
In a city where nearly everything is done by car, the site has to load on a phone at the roadside and show a number to tap.
Auto repair shops hostingEvery trade we cover is on hosting by industry, and every city on our locations page.
Skyline photograph: Blake Everett, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Common questions
Los Angeles hosting questions
My photography site feels slow. How do I tell whether the host is the problem or the site is?
Load a page that carries almost nothing on it, such as your contact page. If that appears quickly and only the gallery pages crawl, the server is fine and the images are doing it. If even the bare page takes several seconds every time, the host is worth questioning. Run the test twice, because the second load is cached and only the first one tells you the truth.
What happens to my site during the busiest weeks of the Los Angeles production and events calendar?
A light page absorbs a rush and nobody notices. A heavy one was already struggling on a quiet Tuesday, and it simply falls over sooner when the bookings pile in. So the honest preparation is not a bigger plan, it is resized images and caching switched on before the season starts. If your pages are already light, you probably do not need to change anything.
If my whole business is a gallery, what do backups actually cover and what do they not?
A backup copies the site files and any database, so a bad update, a broken plugin or a deleted page can be put back. It does not replace your original photographs. Those are master files and they belong on your own drives, with a second copy somewhere else. Check how far back the copies reach, and restore one and watch it work before you ever need it.
Do photographers, med spas and auto repair shops in Los Angeles need anything special from a host?
Mostly no. All three sit comfortably on an ordinary shared plan. What differs is the discipline. Photographers need image preparation far more than they need storage. Med spas take enquiries carrying personal detail, so the form and the mail deserve care. Auto repair shops need a tappable number and a page that works one handed on a phone with poor signal.
Start with the weight, not the plan
Tell us what your site runs on and what it has to show. We will tell you what to fix, what to leave alone, and whether the plan you are already paying for is the right one.
Get Your Web Hosting Plan Get help choosing
Or call 716-771-2536. We are in Buffalo, New York, so we answer Eastern time.