Common Challenges in Web Hosting and How to Overcome Them

How to Overcome Common Challenges in Web Hosting

1. Introduction

Starting your journey in the world of web hosting can seem daunting and there are many potential problems you can run into.

Due to the sheer scope of available plans, hosting providers, and website platforms. It can be easy to find yourself overwhelmed at the prospect of starting a new website. Especially if you’re not too confident using technology!

Luckily, you’re not alone. Our mission is to help make web hosting become accessible to everyone. We want to guide you through overcoming any difficulties you might face.

Web hosting doesn’t need to be scary. With the right tools at your disposal you’ll be online before you know it.

In this guide we aim to cover some of the most common challenges to face in the world of web hosting, mistakes to make, and how to overcome them.

2. Starting your Web Hosting journey

The beginning of your online journey

Starting your very first website, launching your online blog, or going online with your new shop can seem to be a very stressful and intimidating journey.

You may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer variety of hosting plans, hosting providers, platforms, support options, and addons.

If you’re not technically minded. If you aren’t comfortable navigating the world of the internet, then you may feel even more stressed.

Luckily, web hosting doesn’t have to be that complicated.

No need to fear!

In the days before control panels, drag and drop tools, and content management systems. You needed to possess a certain level of technical “know-how” in order to get yourself online. Without hiring someone else to do it for you. These days this is no longer the case thanks to the huge advancements in hosting technology and availability since the turn of the century.

Due to control panels and content management systems (CMS’), designing and hosting a website has become easier than ever before. Traditionally you would need in-depth technical knowledge of coding languages and web development skills to be able to launch a website. Thankfully this is no longer the case!

With the right tools at your disposal and the best hosting providers to help you. Anyone can create and host a professional website with minimal time and effort.

3. Getting Started with Web Hosting

How to choose your domain name?

One of the first things you’ll want to do when going online is choosing a domain name. Your domain name defines your entire online identity so it’s crucial that you make it something memorable, unique, and relevant. You want your domain name to really resonate with your audience and help push your brand in front of customers.

Have a look at our guide to choose the perfect domain name.

Once you’ve picked a domain name for your brand you’ll need to decide on what type of hosting plan is right for your website. With the huge range of hosting services available to choose from, it can be difficult to decide.

How to choose the best Hosting for your Business?

Our blog post explains exactly what each type of web hosting is, and what web hosting plan is most suitable for you.

Next you’ll need to decide on a hosting provider to host your website with. Again this can be a difficult decision due to the sheer amount of different hosting providers available to choose from.

Take your time to properly inform yourself before making a decision. You don’t want to be stuck with an unsatisfactory hosting provider.

4. Common Mistakes made in Web Hosting

What are the most common issues in Web Hosting?

After launching your website you may think that it’ll be smooth sailing from then on. Unfortunately you’d be wrong to think that!

Web hosting can be complex and as such there will be many opportunities for you to trip up and make mistakes. As with anything, human error can cause things to go wrong and lead to mistakes being made.

We all know that learning from your mistakes is one of the best ways to familiarise yourself with a new topic or area.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most common mistakes that are often made in web hosting, and how you can avoid making them.

Breaking your website with plugins

Easily one of the most common issues we see customers raising with us is a faulty plugin causing their website to break, become inaccessible, or go offline.

With CMS’ like WordPress, you can install third-party plugins to extend the functionality of your website. Installing these plugins comes at a risk – as malicious parties can inject malware into plugins, thereby compromising your account. Plugins can also be incompatible with other plugins on your website, the theme, or the version of the CMS you’re using.

Avoiding this can be relatively easy. When installing new plugins for your website, make sure that you’re obtaining them from a legitimate, official source. Rather than a shady third-party website. Avoid installing unnecessary plugins that your website doesn’t need. Additionally, check the compatibility of the plugin before installing it to ensure that no issues arise.

If you are looking to launch your own WordPress website or blog, have a look at our complete guide.

Accidentally deleting content

A classic mistake that you may well have experienced yourself is accidentally deleting files, or content that is vital to the running of your website.

This is unfortunately quite an easy mistake to make. Since beginners might not be aware of the core website files needed to keep the website online.

We find regularly when people are updating websites. They accidentally delete files or folders which causes their website to go offline.

While this can happen to anyone. It’s not always possible to completely avoid this. You can protect yourself against this by regularly backing up all of your website content.

Doing so will allow you to quickly restore your website to a working state in just a few clicks. Meaning you’ll always be safe if anything happens to your website files.

Forgetting to keep your website updated

Keeping your website updated is very important in protecting yourself against vulnerabilities, exploits, and backdoors.

This is especially relevant if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla. As vulnerabilities are often discovered by hackers, and then patched over by the development team in later versions.

Failing to keep your website, plugins, and themes updated can be an open invitation for malicious parties to inject malware into your website.

Fortunately it’s easy and quick to update your website’s software. Most platforms allow for one click updates, so you don’t need to spend time configuring settings or searching for files.

Enabling automatic updates for your website is also a great idea. If you forget about updating your website, the platform will handle it for you.

Letting domain names expire

As we’ve established, owning a domain name is an essential part of hosting an online website. And without it your visitors wouldn’t be able to find you.

However, since it’s a separate service to your hosting plan. You may find that if you forget about your domain name it may eventually expire.

If you’ve ignored the renewal reminders, or have forgotten about your domain name entirely. It may expire and eventually become available for someone else to register!

Most hosting providers design their billing systems to help you avoid letting this happen.

When registering a domain name, you’ll usually be able to enable auto-renewal, as long as you have a valid payment method saved on file.

This means that you don’t need to remember about renewing your domain name. So you’ll have peace of mind that your domain name is safe.

Forgetting login credentials

An age old problem that many internet users experience is forgetting login details for control panels, admin dashboards, and website backends. It’s a simple and easy mistake to make; after all, we are only human! There’s a high chance you’ve probably experienced this yourself if you use multiple different passwords on your various user accounts.

Thankfully this is also usually very easy to solve. The overwhelming majority of websites that require users to login will have a convenient and easy to use password reset feature. Meaning that you can send yourself a password reset email in just a few clicks.

It is good practice though to use a password manager tool such as Lastpass to consolidate all of your passwords into one place for safekeeping.

5. The biggest challenges in Web Hosting

What should you bear in mind with Web Hosting

So we’ve covered the most common mistakes that are often made in web hosting. But you’d be woefully unprepared if you don’t at least briefly familiarise yourself with the biggest challenges that you may face when hosting your website.

Web hosting can present some challenges that can be particularly tricky to overcome. Especially if you’re technically inexperienced or not very comfortable navigating the internet.

Don’t let this put you off though – it’s never as complicated as it seems, and there’s usually an easy way to fix most problems you might run into.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges you might run into when hosting your website, and easy ways to overcome them.

Adapting to growing business needs

After launching your website you’ll be working on building your brand and expanding your business so that you can increase profits.

If your efforts are successful, you’ll find more new visitors landing on your website. Your customer base greatly expanding, and your list of prospects growing.

As your business grows and your brand expands, you’ll find that your hosting requirements are going to increase. More visitors means higher resource usage. Accommodating this growth in traffic can appear to be a formidable challenge at first. Most hosting providers make it easy to accommodate the changing requirements that businesses have. Hosting plans are often designed to let you scale your available resources to your needs.

So if you find your website rapidly growing then you can upgrade your plan quickly and easily. If you’re not sure, contact your hosting provider and see what options they can provide you with.

Ensuring user friendly website design

When launching a website it’s vital that you design the website in a way that’s easy for anyone to navigate and find the information they need quickly.

If your visitors are confused by your website layout, navigational menus, or page content. There’s a good chance they’ll just leave your website. You need to make sure that your site is as user-friendly and accessible as possible.

This can be a challenge in web development due to the massive variety of devices, screen sizes, browser software, and internet speeds.

Fortunately if you’re building your website with a CMS then achieving this can be very straightforward. Platforms such as WordPress let you easily design clean, easy-to-use websites that will adapt to the user’s device or software setup.

Even if you’re developing a website with more traditional methods. There are many tools and utilities that allow you to make your website accessible. Ideally you want to incorporate this philosophy from the first stages of designing the website.

Optimising your website’s speed

Nowadays internet users expect websites to load within a few seconds. Any longer and they will lose interest and leave the website. It comes as no surprise that this has massive impacts on your business and your ability to provide for your users.

Getting your website to load quickly and perform well can be a challenging task depending on the complexity of your website.

Simple blogs and informational sites will usually not experience slow loading times provided you have a good hosting provider. However larger sites with a more complex design may require some tweaking to reach the optimum speeds.

Regardless of how your website is developed, there are always ways to optimise performance. The difficulty of doing this will however depend on how your website is developed.

If you’re using a CMS then you can easily install plugins to help increase performance using methods such as caching, content compression, and static page loading.

If you’ve coded the website yourself then you’ll need to ensure your code is running as efficiently as possible to achieve the best speeds.

Using adequate security

Good security is one of the cornerstones of a solid website, especially in this day and age where malware and hackers are rampant.

Malicious parties are finding more and more ways to gain access to our systems in a time where we rely on technology more than ever before. Failing to use adequate security with your website can result in loss of data, time, and ultimately revenue! It’s easy to make this mistake too – especially if you’re new to the world of web hosting.

This can be relatively easy to overcome with the abundance of security software and malware protection available today. Most website platforms and hosting providers will allow you to easily install malware protection and additional security for your website. They may even have this configured already!

It’s also a great idea to get into good practices with security such as using strong passwords, not giving out your login details, and limiting user access.

6. Conclusion

There are NO challenges you can’t overcome

Don’t let yourself be put off by the technical side of web hosting. Especially given how many useful tools and platforms available to help you in your journey.

Getting your website online has been easier than ever before. In most cases you don’t need to employ a web developer to help you! With a good hosting provider and a solid hosting plan, you’ll be online before you know it.

At AUHost4u our focus is making web hosting as easy and painless as possible. Our team is always on hand to help, no matter what.