A Guide to Enterprise Website Hosting That Scales

You’ve toppled your competition and grown your business both in size and in capabilities. Hats off to you! As you continue to grow and scale, are you sure that your website hosting plan meets your needs? Regardless of whether your website’s CMS is WordPress, Drupal, or something else, it is important to make sure your online assets are secure and protected as you scale up.

In the same way that it is healthy for a business to grow and change, your web hosting setup should also be able to flex and provide scalability. As your web presence ages and as you progress and succeed, chances are you will need to upgrade your web hosting plan.

Important Pieces of a Web Hosting Plan

Cost-Effective Web Hosting

Since web hosting is an ongoing service like the rest of your company overhead, it is important that the cost over time is worth it. While cheap hosting options exist, it is important to weigh your options and consider that paying a little bit more and in return having fewer issues and reliable service may save you some opportunity cost over time.

Web Hosting with Scalability

If your business or website grows quickly, you need a hosting plan that can keep up and grow at your same pace. Small shared hosting plans can be a great starting point for many companies, but can quickly become problematic once your site outgrows your hosting capabilities.

Adequate Security Practices

Perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle is the security of your website and data. Protecting your business and your customer information is likely not worth risking for a low price tag, so make sure your hosting company strictly adheres to adequate security practices.

Adapting Your Web Hosting Setup as Your Company Grows & Scales 

When you first start your business and launch your first website, it is typical that a cheap and small web hosting plan will suffice. However, as the years go on and as your business and your website needs shift, it is important that your hosting plan can scale with you. Below are examples of what you will typically see for hosting based on size of company.

Small Business Web Hosting

Typically, a small company functions just fine on a shared hosting plan. This involves multiple websites that are hosted on a single server and share resources such as computing power, RAM, and hard drive space to keep costs down.

Online-Dependant & Medium-Sized Business Web Hosting

Sometimes a business depends almost entirely on the internet and their website for revenue to flow, as is the case with Ecommerce websites. In these situations, it is necessary to give a little more weight to your hosting decisions. If your site has a shopping cart, or if your business is generally big enough to warrant needing more focused attention and priority on a server, you may consider upgrading your hosting plan. 

This can mean hosting your site on a small cloud-based server with resources specifically allocated to you. While this ensures a higher level of stability for your Ecommerce business, these plans remain limited in that they only compute the amount of resources necessary to handle a certain amount of website traffic. As a result, your site may not function if you see an uptick in site traffic.

Large Company & Enterprise Web Hosting

Large enterprises or companies with big scalability (franchises, e.g.) often call for a bigger and better hosting setup. This means a dedicated hosting server where they are the only client and extra resources to accommodate increased web traffic, bandwidth, and RAM.

While these plans are the most expensive, the infinite scalability and features like the ability to transition to load balancing (splitting traffic across multiple servers) will keep your site up and running 24/7 and, in turn, keep your revenue flowing freely.

When is the Right Time to Change My Web Hosting?

Whenever you are undergoing a major change in your company’s structure, adding on additional domains or applications, or if you are unsatisfied with your current hosting provider, it may be time to consider a change or a scale-up. Some particular key indicators may be a slow website, lots of website traffic, or frequent and unexpected downtime.

What are the important things to consider or questions to ask when setting up enterprise or franchise web hosting?

When setting out on the task of finding the right hosting provider no matter how large or small your enterprise, it is important to consider that price is not the only factor in comparing solutions. Some good questions to ask a potential web hosting provider are:

• How often do you do backups?
• Where are backups stored?
• How long are backups stored? 
• How do you handle security updates for the server?
• How do you handle security updates for the website or application?
• What happens if someone breaks into my site?
• What security measures do you implement?
• How will this solution scale and grow with my business?

BuildThis Solutions for Enterprise Website Hosting

BuildThis is a Chicago-based web agency and hosting company offering three basic tiers of service. All tiers include the following:

• Daily, Weekly, Monthly Backups (we keep monthly backups forever)
• Automatic server security updates
• Routine website and application security updates
• Two firewalls (at the data center level and on the server itself)
  • With an optional third level using a service like CloudFlare

Web Hosting Tiers

Standard Web Hosting

This includes everything listed above, shared resources, and a free SSL certificate.

Premium Web Hosting

Includes everything in the standard package, dedicated resources, a free SSL certificate, and can host multiple websites.

Custom Web Hosting Package

Our custom package is made to fit your needs. It includes everything above, even more dedicated resources, a free SSL certificate, can host multiple websites, and is infinitely scalable. We offer custom solutions like managed databases, extra storage, fail-over, load balancer, multiple data centers, and customized backup solutions.