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The Pitfalls of Your Website Hosting

To better illustrate the points talked about in the video, I compared a WordPress based dental website on a shared hosting platform to one on a dedicated hosting platform. Over the past 15 minutes I ran the shared hosting website (Dr. Payet) against a dedicated hosting website (Salem Dentist).

The speed differences ranged from at lowest, dedicated hosting site 53% faster, to worst with the dedicated hosting site 20x faster (852 milliseconds vs 16,672 milliseconds). Average over all tests was the dedicated hosting being 300% faster with Salem loading 3.2 seconds faster than Dr. Payet’s.

This perfectly illustrates the pitfall of shared hosting. When your shared host gets busy, you suffer the consequences.

Test your site and compare for yourself @ www.WhichLoadsFaster.com

Had some thoughts today about the platform that you’re building your website on. There’s a lot of different options out there that you can use to build your next website. Some of them proprietary, some of them nonproprietary and I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the different options that exist. Some quick pros and cons of each and what those really mean to you as a dentist when you hear different words thrown out with Joomla or WordPress or proprietary content systems and what that really means to you as a dentist. When you’re building your website there’s some kind of back in that has to store that information, there’s a system that has to manage and control that information, that’s what we’re talking about today is those systems that really are seamless. It’s kind of like your practice management software, you can run eagle soft and soft den and curve and all the different systems, they all have pros and cons and what does it really mean to you, which one do you want to do. Here we actually run all WordPress, we run a modified WordPress platform that we have dubbed Snap and what Snap does for us is it gives us some increase security, it gives us increase reliability, we do daily backups for all of our clients, it’s a complete managed WordPress solution. In addition to offering a dedicated hosting platform, and what dedicated hosting means is we see a lot of WordPress sites that are hosted out on hostmonster of blue host or these shared hosting platforms and all of the sites almost without exception are laggy, they’re slow to load, they’re slow to pull up. If you go to any of our websites you see that they come up instantly, we’ve got 100 meg pipe to the internet that has a dedicated server, we also got redundancy in Atlanta, Georgia as well as here in Louisville. When you look at one of our sites versus a WordPress platform that’s hosted elsewhere you notice it loads a lot quicker, that’s because we’ve got a lot more processing power in here in house, we’ve got more server capacity and we’re also not hosting like bluehost and hostmonster where they might host 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 websites on one server machine, we’re only hosting a fraction of that so our threshold is a lot lower which delivers a lot higher quality of service. We also have a third party monitoring service that we use to insure that our websites stay up 24/7, we have over I think the past year something like 99.99% uptime availability of our website which is, if you look at anything across the internet Google offers 99.9% uptime with their business services and we’re running at .99% which if you do the math I think it comes out to something like 6 hours that the website is down per year, the majority of that is in the middle of the night when we’re running scheduled updates and the site is down for five to ten minutes at a time but we’ve actually installed our monitoring on hostmonster in the past on several occasions on hostmonster and found that they usually run anywhere from 87 to 94% uptime. So you have a lot more availability, a lot more speed, a lot more processing power, overall quicker faster experience. Getting back to the platforms that you can run: proprietary vs WordPress or vs Joomla or what other system you might be looking at out there. The main benefits to running an open source platform, anybody can build a platform you could use but the problem is then you’re locked in with that platform. If you go to prosites or there’s a lot of companies out there that offer the template of IDA comes to mind, you cannot transfer their websites, you can transfer the domain but the website itself is built on a proprietary platform that once you build that site, you’re locked in, that’s the end of the road, it can’t be expanded, it can’t be transferred, you pay for it as long as you’re with that company and if you decide to leave you have to build another website. If you decide you want to redesign your website build another website. When you’re working with a WordPress platform or an open source Joomla platform, for one you’re portable, if you decide that you’re not the best provider for your needs if you decide that whoever you’re with you don’t like them anymore you could pick it up and take it with you. If you decide you’re tired of paying the fees of managing your own website, I’m sorry, having your webmaster make all the updates for you, with WordPress you can instantly go in and make changes to your website yourself, if you can edit a word document, you can edit your own website with WordPress,it’s just that easy. Often times when we’re going through some changes in the website with a client, we’ll have them on the phone, we’ll be making changes in real time while they watch and I say click refresh and you can see the changes we just made. Often times with proprietary platforms you’re often very reliant upon the provider because you don’t have any portability or control to do things such as security checks and backups because they are in full control of the system because it’s grown there’s not any way you can backup your data. Really there’s not a purpose to backup your data because even if you have a backup of your website and it’s from a proprietary platform you still can’t really do anything with that data. It would be like, for instance if you have Eagle soft in your office and you have a backup and your server crashes and then you install Softdent, you can’t just restore your Eagle soft backup and you’re off to the races, you have to convert that Eagle soft to Softdent and then it would be able to read it, well same way with proprietary platforms, if you are able to do a back up you’re still not portable, you’re still locked into that platform. Most proprietary systems don’t allow you to do that kind of backup and security checks just because it’s an inherent flaw of how the overall scheme of things work. With WordPress or any other platform you also have the availability of the third party market, you have the ability to go out to the WordPress marketplace by themes, by plugins, expandability add-on features very easily and in many cases for free without having to pay for an expensive web developer to develop it for you. If you’re on a proprietary platform then you’re going to be stuck paying for somebody to do that for you as for WordPress somebodys already invented the wheel out there somewhere and they’ll allow you to download it for free or a small fee, 10 to 20 bucks vs paying a developer a $100 bucks an hour to create something for you a function your website does. Maybe its a contact form, maybe it’s a little floating widget on the side of the screen, maybe it’s a notification bar at the top or whatever it may be, you have that third party marketplace with all kind of availability.

Episode 035: The One About the Pitfalls of Your Website Hosting [video] [ 8:46 | 135.04 MB ] Download (79)