Web designers: which web hosting is right for you?

The holy trinity of online existence – web hosting, web design and websites form the zodiac we call the Internet. The question however lingers which of them is more important. In this article we take a look at web hosting and web design and the relation between them.

Building a website is nothing less than a classic catch 22. You cannot have web design without web hosting and vice versa. There is thus little use in claiming that one is more important than the other. What is worth appreciating however is how they separately and together can contribute to the creation of a great website?

The overall attitude towards the quest for web hosting is not pleasant. People seem to hate the very thought of such technical necessities. In fact, the hosting industry is one of few business segments that has survived despite such an evident customer dissatisfaction.

A skewed relationship between buyer and seller has tipped the balance in power, seemingly favoring hosting providers. And seeing as we are referring to a market dominated, with few exceptions, by nerds in grey hoodies and birkenstocks, this perception is not all that hard to imagine.

However, good web hosting is more than an urban legend. It can be found with little effort. The predicament more than often lies in a webmaster’s inability to determine what he needs and expects from his hosting provider to be. When later those needs become clear, a hosting plan has often already been obtained, inevitably resulting in dissatisfaction with the existing plan.

This is when web design enters the picture. Web hosting needs should be determined according to:

• Traffic volume and connecting data load – every time a visitor enters the site, the web browser retrieves the data from the hosting provider’s server. With many visitors and heavy content on the site (high resolution images for example) the server bandwidth and CPU usage need to be extensive. Keeping to a light web design is one way to avoid getting a costly hosting plan.
• Skills and ambitions in web design – a hosting account is normally accessible via an user interface or control panel if you wish. To set up a pre-scripted website or CMS and never to return again is one thing. However, if the plan is to manually design and develop the website, such tools like FTP client, file manager and database management are to be reviewed and valued.

In conclusion, the purpose of the site is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration. For a portfolio or blog, nothing larger than shared hosting is required. Larger sites, running on heavier content management systems that receives a fair amount of traffic, will need dedicated hosting or at least, vps hosting.

In any case, a web designer looking for total freedom in regards to web hosting, should be more concerned about what software and tools are included in a plan, rather than it technical liberties.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Blog, How-to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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