You’ve probably come to this website because you’re a southwest Florida small business owner and you want someone to design a website for you. That’s great! We love to design websites, especially for Sarasota-Bradenton small businesses.
But if you’re not in the digital marketing industry, then you might not know about website hosting and website management. Hosting and management aren’t as exciting as website design, but they are the two most fundamental aspects of your website.
Here at Bradenton’s Deckard & Company, we think these two fundamental website functions should be kept as a package deal.
Like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial says, website hosting and website management are like peanut butter and chocolate: two great tastes that taste great together. Today your friendly Bradenton digital marketing expert is going to tell you why.
What is Website Hosting?
Your company’s digital presence is like a powerful boat. The website design includes the propellers and rudder, the shape of the bow and even the navigation system.
Website hosting is the engine room.
Without getting too technical, websites are complicated collections of a lot of digital information, sorted into complicated files.
A web hosting service stores all of the files your site needs to look the way it does, run the way it runs, and operate the way it needs to operate, for hundreds of thousands of internet users around the world. Website hosting makes sure all of these people can use your website the way you want them to.
Most computer systems simply don’t have anywhere near the amount of storage space needed to handle all of these files and all of these users, all at once, all around the world.
And because a web host stores these files, it also needs to make sure they’re secure. Website security is a big part of web hosting.
People need to be able to use your site, but at the same time, the web host makes sure they can’t access any of your business’s private information that may be linked to the site. This information could include passwords and financial account info—for you as well as your visitors and customers.
What is Website Management?
If website hosting is the engine room, then website management is the engineer who keeps it running.
When something goes wrong in the engine room, your website is dead in the water. You need an engineer who is responsible for finding and fixing the problem, ASAP. In fact, website management involves being diligent and solving small problems before they become big ones.
And just like a powerful engine, when a website goes down, it could be one of several hundred problems. A website manager will check all of these sources and know how to get them fixed.
Why Should Website Hosting and Website Management Be Handled Together?
Separating website hosting services from website management is like taking the key to the engine room and keeping it away from all of the engineers. They won’t know there’s a problem until it’s too late, and then it will take them forever to get in there, assess the situation, figure out what needs to be done, and then get it fixed.
As with any commercial operation, you want your website to be seamlessly integrated from its basic files through to its fanciest designs. The more locked doors you put up, and the more things will go wrong.
So whether you’re starting from scratch on your Bradenton business website, or you’ve had a lot of starts and stops along the way, trust us: Your website hosting service and your website management service need to be as closely aligned as possible.
What Website Hosting Platform does Deckard & Company Use?
Like we said from the beginning, we love to design awesome websites for Bradenton businesses and all you other amazing entrepreneurs in Sarasota, Lakewood Ranch and beyond.
And the more websites we’ve designed over the years, the more expertise and experience we developed with certain website hosts, content-management systems (CMS), and all other components that go into websites. We know what works best for ourselves, our customers, and our designs.
All that being said, we build our websites with WordPress; our website hosting company is FlyWheel. These two well-established digital powerhouses have been designed to work well together. FlyWheel supports WordPress’s file organization systems, so when I design a WordPress site, I know that it’s safe, secure, and easy to manage in FlyWheel.
Deckard & Company offers website hosting and website management, in addition to website design, because we want to see our pretty, powerful boats get to where they need to go. They don’t do anybody any good when they’re stuck motionless at sea.
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