Web Hosting for Agencies and Freelancers UK

Web Hosting for Agencies and Freelancers - What to Consider?

For a freelancer or agencies, an attractive online presence is usually an essential requirement to be found by potential clients and to convince them of their products and services. However, it is equally important to use reliable and technically optimized web hosting. Otherwise, there may be significant disadvantages such as a downgrade in search engine rankings or increased work and costs.

What Features are Important for Agencies and Freelancers in Web Hosting?

For a simple website with a limited number of visitors, a modern web hosting is not a challenge. For commercial and publicly oriented offers, the situation is quite different: especially for a new business, the need for capacities and resources is much harder to scale. In addition, technical factors that could negatively affect performance, accessibility, and SEO must be considered. Apart from costs, some essential features that are sometimes insufficiently, rarely, or belatedly considered include:

• Reliability, support, and competence of the hoster
• Bandwidth and connection to global internet nodes
• Infrastructure security and protection against DDoS attacks
• Size of storage space on the web hosting
• Number of databases, email accounts, and subdomains
• Support for programming languages, extensions, and modules
• Options for configuring the web server and PHP interpreter used
• Interface for administration and direct access via SSH to the web hosting
• Length and flexibility of contracts

It is worthwhile for a freelancer or a web design agency to invest sufficient time in comparing offers and selecting an optimal hosting provider. Unlike a domain, a subsequent migration usually involves considerable time and effort.

What Disadvantages Arise from Unsuitable Web Hosting?

When it comes to a purely private website, unfavorable factors in web hosting usually do not have concrete effects, as long as they do not lead to higher costs. However, for a commercial presence on the internet, things are different. The accessibility and speed of servers are crucial factors for mobile website ranking, as Google announced in a publication in 2018, stating that since July of the same year, this has been an important factor. This criterion has been in place for desktop computers or laptops since 2010. This is particularly important because nearly two-thirds of all visits are now made via tablet PCs or smartphones - especially for inquiries about products and services.

Unfavorable web hosting always leads to negative consequences - this applies equally to an over- or under-dimensioned offer as well as to unsuitable packages that do not meet the necessary requirements for efficient operation. High costs only pose a low risk - the impact of lacking administration options such as through interfaces, SSH access or FTP, and poor Server Response Time directly affects the balance sheet and chances of success.

What are the options for efficient web hosting?

The optimal choice for web hosting depends on several factors. Due to the time involved and from a security perspective, it is often wise to outsource administration and use webspace or a Managed Server. While there are some exceptions - such as a web design agency with its own infrastructure for clients, which they realize via VPS Hosting or Dedicated Server - in most cases, the support and setup are too complex to efficiently handle alongside daily business operations. Therefore, individual freelancers and smaller agencies should prioritize webspace or Managed Servers unless they have the necessary time and qualified expertise in system maintenance and IT security.