Your website wouldn’t work without computers hooked up to the internet but how those computers are connected and configured can mean the difference between a fast, secure experience or an insecure, slow mess.
Why do we host sites?
If you have little experience in choosing a hosting solution, without knowing what to compare, you may over pay or simply choose the cheapest route—because the price is the only thing you understand.
Throughout the years, we’ve been through many different providers. Ultimately, we’ve found that managing the hosting of our client’s websites on virtual cloud servers is ideal because it gives us complete control over the hosting environment your site runs in while a robust upstream provider handles the actual hardware and networking.
Not all hosting is created equal
Here's why you might choose to have us host your website:
- Websites have gotten more complex
- We're dedicated to you
- We optimize for speed & growth
- We keep your site's software maintained securely
Often with inexpensive, budget minded "shared" hosts, their servers will have outdated software or will be locked down to prevent certain features. With thousands of users, big hosts can't guarantee every piece of code their users run is stable, well written, resource friendly, and won't slow down a server.
Big hosting companies often "oversell" their capacity as well. Web hosts can never guarantee how much traffic and server resources their users consume so administrators make a gamble about how many sites will "fit" on one computer, oftentimes to maximize profit. It's a bit like a highway—there's only so many lanes, and when those lanes fill up, you get traffic jams.
On the other end of the spectrum, companies often reach for expensive, "dedicated" servers to mitigate these issues. After all, downtime and slow loading is costly. But oftentimes, these servers sit at 1% capacity which means you're overpaying by 99%. Want any kind of redundancy? Now you're paying twice as much.
Websites have gotten more complex
These days, everyone is expecting more out of their website. While the hardware has gotten better, at the same time, websites have also gotten remarkably complex. Years ago, content management systems weren't as common or they simply didn't provide as much functionality.
Today's websites require more server resources and faster connections. No longer are we content with static sites—a website can often change on every page load, piping in real-time inventory right to shopping cart, user-specific content, or loading up-to-the-second tweets or comments from social media channels.
We're dedicated to you
With us, your site might only be "shared" with a few other like-minded clients (if any at all). Unlike other hosting, it’s in our best interest to make sure all of our sites run fast and are well maintained. We know how your site is supposed to work and perform as well, so if something does goes wrong, we know just where to fix it.
And because we're helping you with marketing, we can help ramp up quickly, adding web capacity in the event your website makes it on the evening news. Oftentimes, IT administrators have no idea what the marketing folks are up to which leads to surprises down the road.
We'll optimize for speed and growth
Did you know that how fast your website loads plays a part in how Google ranks your website? Not only that, Amazon found that for every 100 ms extra of page load time (that's 1/10 of a second), it caused a drop of sales by 1%?
So having an optimized website and a fast server can mean the difference between someone becoming your next customer or someone waiting for your shopping cart to load.
A fast and highly optimized website also means your website can handle much more traffic. When we build your website, we make it load as fast as possible using the latest technologies... such as server side caching, and utilizing content delivery networks (CDNs) so your site is served to the server closest to them.
If that all sounds latin to you, in real world terms: when a local television station or the New York Times does a story on your business, your users won't be sitting waiting for the website's home page to load... we'll be ready and waiting to tell your story! Just because your site doesn't get millions of hits now doesn't mean it never will.
We'll keep your site maintained, too
Just like the operating system on your computer, the software that runs your website needs to stay updated. As part our hosting agreement, we will keep the content management system (CMS) in tip-top shape, so when there’s new features, updates, and security fixes, we’ll do the maintenance work for you so you can focus on what you do best—running your organization.
Technology-focused companies are often keen to sell you a server and a network connection but they don't actually use your software. Asking your web provider about why a particular update from your CMS somehow broke your website is something we never want you to go through.
Or maybe you need a refresher on exactly where to update the hero banner on the home page we built. We'll be glad to walk you through it. Doesn't peace of mind feel good?
IT Consulting
How does your website fit into IT? Is it marketing or Internet Technology? What about your email?
As a solutions provider, Ritter Knight sits at the intersection of IT and marketing and we have knowledge that traditional help desk support staff lack when it comes to website hosting and email.
If you need answers, we have them.