Web Hosting: Media Temple vs. “The Others”

Question: What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting service is a service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a web server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. The more powerful the server, the faster it can serve up website pages. Slower, smaller servers may result in frustrating lag time for viewers. High traffic can also slow servers that are not powerful enough to handle high volumes of data exchange.

Tell Me Straight:

Q. Which Web Hosting Provider is the best?

A. Media Temple. Nothing else comes close.

The Benefits of using our web host (Media Temple)

Many clients ask us about the benefits of hosting their website with us as opposed to using some of the cheaper services like GoDaddy hosting. My answer to them is the added value your business receives when hosting with us.

Our fully managed web hosting fees cover:

• Web hosting with plenty of storage space and bandwidth
• Email hosting for POP/IMAP/Forwarder accounts (other companies may charge extra)
• mySQL database hosting for your dynamically driven website and blog (GoDaddy and Network Solutions charge about $10/month extra just for this)
• Monthly backups so that your data is safe and recoverable
• Uptime monitoring so that your site doesn’t go down for too long during high traffic situations (we watch your website minute-by-minute and if it goes down we take the necessary actions to bring it back up)
• Software and security updates

On top of this you get to use our premium tools at no additional charge like:

• 24/7 access to your Content Management System to login and make simple changes to your website
• Google Analytics with automated monthly traffic reports
• WordPress blog with enhanced blogging tools
• Photo gallery and form building tools
• Our proven set of SEO tools
• Excellent technical support via phone, email and online trouble tickets so that you can always talk to someone when you need help.

Why Our Hosting is Better

I agree that there are many other web hosting providers that only charge $5/month. However, we use Media Temple, the industry leader in web hosting. This ensures that your website and data stays secure and stable. The cheaper hosts use ‘shared’ environments where they place your website on the same server with thousands of other websites. If just one of those websites gets hacked into or attacked, then your website becomes compromised. Just one bad website can take the whole server down, causing downtime and slow loading times. We use dedicated Media Temple servers, eliminating this ‘bad neighbor’ syndrome.

Why is a high performance hosting plan worth the money?

Because page load speeds matter to everyone; slow pages loads are bad for visitors and they have a negative impact on Google SERPs (search engine results pages). They drive down your advertising revenues. In other words, buying a cheap shared web hosting plan is a penny-wise, pound foolish decision. It appears to save you money, but it really doesn’t. In fact, it could cost you dearly in lost revenue.

How can it reduce your revenues? Here’s how: For your site visitors, slow page loads gets old fast, so they leave quickly – perhaps faster than they might otherwise. This drives up your website bounce rate (which Google watches very closely) and it reduces the average page views per visitor (which Google also watches closely). That means fewer total page views and, presumably, less clicks on advertisements by your visitors.

It also has an effect on Google and your incoming traffic loads from search. Why? Because Google sees that your site isn’t doing much for your customers – they are leaving fast, perhaps faster than from other related sites they might be visiting to get similar information. So, they drop your site down in the SERPs, perhaps way down, which means fewer people see your site to begin with. If you choose a bad hosting provider that delivers slow page loads, then you get less total traffic from Google and you get fewer pages views from the visitors who do find you – and that translates directly into lower advertising and other revenues.[1]

Fully Managed Solution

Our hosting solutions are also ‘fully managed’ which means that we take care of all the software and security updates and ensure that everything is running smoothly so that you don’t have to worry about your website going down. If you host your site elsewhere, you have to take care of these issues on your own, usually requiring experience with a Linux webserver.