Confused about your website hosting? You're not alone.
The web hosting marketplace is a tangle of providers, resellers, wouldbe experts and power advertising. With little standard terminology, services are hard to comprehend and harder to compare.
Key factors include:
A small-medium business without IT staff of its own needs maximum website performance with minimal administration.
We believe the answer is:
...akin to renting a house or flat. You need somewhere to live, with the right resources. So does your website. So does your email account.
Hosting provides the resources, along with a publicly known 'address' for people to visit (your website) or to send letters (emails), anytime.
...a computer (hardware + software + physical connection to Internet) specially set up to 'host' websites.
...a computer (or part of a computer) specially set up to host email.
Not all webhosting services supply email hosting on your own domain. That's because email management is notoriously difficult and client support for email problems can be very timeconsuming.
At SuttonNet, we regard own-domain email as essential for businesses. So we supply a free email service for every website that we host. Extra mailboxes or larger mailboxes are available on a fee for service basis.
Those clients who need feature-rich mail hosting have their email hosted elsewhere: eg they use MS Office 365. They can still have their website hosted with SuttonNet.
...where the hosting service looks after your website settings and email settings on the web server, updates software and makes sure the site keeps running well.
The alternative is for each website owner to look after their own site's hosting. That is done via their customer interface to the server.
SuttonNet only offers managed hosting. We lease the right servers, configured to suit our custom built websites, and take care of every hosting need for your website and email.
...affect how well your website runs. They include:
... a set of computers (and other devices) that share hosting for a group of websites. If one device breaks down or needs maintenance, the others automatically take over. The websites aren't affected.
Cloud servers are easy to expand (scale up) whenever more storage space is needed.
...a server specially set up for and managed by one user. One 'user' could mean a hosting service; or a large business that has its own web server.
A complication here: a web server can be part of a larger computer, fenced off from the rest by having its own operating system and restricted user access. This 'dedicated server' has its own software, and it can't be accessed from other parts of the larger unit. But there might actually be many such servers on the one computer.
SuttonNet combines dedicated server and cloud technology with fully managed hosting.
Last updated 15 November 2020