Our hosting platform is changing and here’s why that’s good news for you.
We’re web developers, and as you probably know, there’s a lot that comes with that territory. We not only build WordPress websites, we also create content for them, run marketing campaigns, and improve SEO to drive the traffic that make those websites a smart investment in the first place. And, when something breaks on a website we build, we work with our clients to discover the error and get everything up and running again.
When we first started building websites, many of our clients were still trying to handle hosting themselves off of private servers in their back offices. Fortunately, the Internet has moved on since then, but that hasn’t made it any easier for our clients to find good hosting solutions. And as we’ve seen, choosing the wrong hosting service can result in slow load times or websites that crash under too much traffic.
Because hosting is such an important part of website infrastructure, we have made it our business to find the best providers for ourselves and our clients. That is why Pantheon has become our new recommended web host for our clients. Here’s why.
Tired of moving? Elastic hosting eliminates the need for exhaustive infrastructure overhauls.
One of the first questions most businesses had to grapple with as they made hosting choices used to be “how much space do I need?” Hosting is like paying rent for your space on the Internet, and like rent, hosting costs can become expensive if you need a lot of space. You don’t want to pay for more space than you need, but at the same time, you don’t want to try to be economical with that space only to quickly outgrow it.
Fortunately, with Pantheon, you never need to worry about space again. Pantheon uses elastic hosting, which expands and contracts according to your needs. You no longer need to work out whether you need to pay for shard or dedicated servers. Elastic hosting means that if you anticipate your needs incorrectly, or if your traffic volume increases faster than you had planned, you won’t have to schedule planned downtime while someone resizes your servers. Instead, that upgrade will happen automatically as your hosting requirements change.
Pantheon’s smooth scaling mean you never have to worry about sudden traffic spikes.
What if your hosting needs, month-to-month, are fairly stable, but you want to be prepared in case you suddenly attract an unexpected volume of traffic? These moments of “going viral,” while not common, are also a contingency that many of our non-profit or B2C customers want to be prepared for. After all, they invest a lot of resources in gaining customer attention. The last thing they want is to be unable to capitalize on an opportunity because their hosting failed the moment their fifteen minutes of fame hit.
Like elastic hosting, Pantheon’s smooth scaling resolves this problem instantly. In the past, handling a traffic spike usually meant someone had to notice the spike and then allocate more resources to handle the traffic flow. With smooth scaling, this process happens automatically. Patheon uses horizontal scaling to help websites spread their resources faster in case of a traffic surge. This responsiveness eliminates downtime and shortages, so that you can ensure that your visitors will always have access to your content—no matter how popular you become.
And, because you aren’t on a shared server, you won’t have to worry about another site consuming resources when you need them.
We’ve still got your back, providing the support you need before a crisis hits.
Finally, our hosting package includes several other services designed to make managing and running a website easier for our clients. Specifically, this service package includes:
- Static IP and SSL certificate. Included with Pantheon hosting, this is a standard security feature on your site necessary to protect both you and your visitors from a variety of cyber threats. It’s also a Google ranking factor, and an important trust indicator for your site.
- CloudFlare Pro nameserver. A DNS record is what lets users on the Internet find your website by searching for its name rather than by IP address. CloudFlare provides continuous uptime, superior lookup speed, and DDoS protection from cyber attacks.
- Quarterly maintenance by our dev team. Updating themes and plugins is necessary for peak functionality and to avoid security flaws, but doing so can also unexpectedly affect site functionality. We manage theme and plugin updates to be sure they can be implemented without breaking your site.
By handling these services behind the scenes, we reduce the number of bills you have to keep track of and ensure that your site is running well before anything goes wrong. Think of it like owning a car, except that we’re handling your license plate renewals, oil changes, and tire rotations for you. And because we can bundle these services together, we can handle everything more efficiently, with less hassle for you.
So, if this sounds like a better hosting solution than what you currently have, contact us. We’re happy to give you more information about our hosting and maintenance package so you can make the best decision for your business.