Web Hosting Versus WordPress Hosting
Popularity doesn’t always guarantee quality, but it’s a good place to start. Anyone looking to design and launch a website needs to acknowledge the success of the WordPress content management system. This market-leading web development tool underpins 28% of the world’s websites – and the same proportion of the top ranked one million most-visited sites.
It’s an extraordinary success given the many competitors for WordPress’s crown. Rival CMS including Magneto and Joomla have loyal armies of adherents, with different attributes and some notable advantages over the market leader. Midphase has also designed a user-friendly website building tool for our customers. We can launch a site within minutes of choosing your preferred plan, making this one of the quickest ways to get a new enterprise or business idea online.
Of course, Midphase also manages WordPress hosting for numerous sites. We’re big fans of the market leader’s intuitive interface, and being able to add over 50,000 plugins gives our customers immense flexibility over their site’s contents and functionality. In this article, we consider which option might work best for your business or brand, outlining the rival merits of web hosting and WordPress hosting.
What is hosting?
In essence, it’s the process of making your site visible to the world. Web hosting involves a specialist company storing the various pages and content elements of your website on a server, ready to be accessed across the internet. When these files are publicly available, anyone can view and interact with them by entering the relevant website address into their browser or clicking a link from a third-party site. Without hosting, a website is simply a collection of pages stored offline that can’t be viewed.
A web hosting company bears a great deal of responsibility. It has to ensure the different components of each site can be instantly accessed by people using a variety of different operating systems, from Android and iOS to Linux and Windows. It needs to cater for a spectrum of web browsers, including obsolete platforms like Internet Explorer and the sluggish privacy-oriented Tor browser. The host company needs to pipe information through high-speed networks in a matter of milliseconds to minimize time spent waiting for content to display. It has to robustly protect information on its servers against malicious activity, and it’s got to prevent sensitive data like financial records falling into the wrong hands.
The need for speed
It could be argued that speed is the number one priority for any hosting provider. Search engines take page loading times into account when organizing their ranking results, and consumers will begin abandoning pages if they take more than three seconds to load. While companies and individuals are largely responsible for ensuring their site isn’t bloated with excessively large images or unnecessary code, it’s the hosting provider’s job to manage simultaneous demands for page access with equal efficiency. That’s why companies like Midphase invest in huge data centers across multiple countries, full of high-speed servers capable of handling spikes in demand without damaging the user experience.
There are three main types of hosting package, with shared hosting representing the most cost-effective option. A number of other websites share the server your own site is on, slashing costs as compared to dedicated server solutions. The host company can apply security patches to numerous sites at once for real-time updates, protecting against specific and general threats alike. Cloud hosting is an alternative, offering greater scalability and far more control over the quantities of storage and memory required. It also ensures your site won’t be affected by unexpected hardware failures. Larger companies may reserve a dedicated server for high-traffic or popular sites, with full control panel management of every aspect.
Live and direct
Midphase offer all three types of hosting packages for websites created on numerous platforms, on behalf of companies in any industry. Our global footprint ensures audiences in Kansas, Kampala and Kyoto are able to view our client websites quickly and dependably. We specialize in supplying domain names and servers, with a handy search tool on our homepage identifying whether particular URLs are still available. And most importantly, we accept websites designed in a number of CMS tools – or even through our popular in-house platform.
These are some of the best ways to design a website, starting with an option rather close to our hearts…
Midphase websites
Hosting a site designed in a third-party application tends to be more complicated than designing and launching it on the host company’s own platform. This is why Midphase created our Website Builder package, with a hundred professional templates waiting to be customized and edited. Even our entry-level Essential package supports a ten-page site with 250MB of file storage, while the Business Unlimited package lives up to its name in both regards. It also comes with a free domain name.
Creating a website is as easy as selecting a template, adding or uploading content, and then clicking the Publish button. Designing a website is no harder than creating an ecard; drag-and-drop interfaces show how the end product will look, one tweak at a time. Adding in supposedly technical features like image galleries or social media links only requires a couple of mouse-clicks; all the coding takes place behind the scenes. You don’t need to understand HTML or appreciate the nuances of cascading style sheets to create something that looks stunning and works perfectly.
WordPress websites
Many of the principles outlined above also apply to WordPress. Its site development interface is simplicity itself to navigate, and even industry newcomers can quickly create dynamic sites providing they have good-quality raw materials to draw on. Any website needs eye-catching photographs and concise, entertaining copy to engage a modern audience. Some WordPress templates are specially designed for visual industries, while others (like the hugely popular blog templates) are oriented around written content.
WordPress excels at customization, with tens of thousands of bolt-on software tools providing endless flexibility over and above the powerful standard software. These plugins provide ecommerce functionality, manage social media accounts, display interactive maps, and much more besides. If you can imagine a web-based service, there’s probably a plugin for it. The code is automatically streamlined to load as quickly as possible, with search engine optimization boosting its position in future search results.
In terms of our own WordPress hosting, Midphase has configured servers to support the nuances of the WordPress platform. That increases loading speeds and site security. It enables us to ensure servers are up to date with any patches or revisions, helping WordPress sites to display and operate more effectively.
Rival websites
Of course, WordPress has many rivals. Brands like Drupal and Joomla have thriving communities of amateur coders and helpful forumites as well. Both platforms offer extensive functionality for ecommerce websites, and both provide powerful standard frameworks that can be customized with thousands (or tens of thousands) of modules and extensions.
Each WordPress alternative has its own merits and drawbacks, from cost and security levels to the degree of technical knowledge required for effective operation. Some include standard features that WordPress doesn’t, such as banner management in Joomla and integrated ecommerce functionality in Magento.
As with our WordPress hosting solutions, Midphase offers compatibility with other web design tools as well. We offer a variety of shared hosting packages, which are tailor-made for companies with a site ready to be launched. Our monthly packages include a free domain name, unlimited web space and bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts. And since many companies are sales-oriented, we include a database suitable for powering inventories and maintaining real-time stock levels.
So which platform is right for me?
There’s no such thing as an obvious web hosting solution. Some people appreciate the all-in-one simplicity of Midphase’s web builder and hosting service. Others are unable to look beyond WordPress’s market-leading plugins, while many favor specific attributes of other design packages like Drupal.
It’s also important to understand CMS tools like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are merely variations on a theme. Each will automatically create HTML files for separate web pages, ready to be uploaded onto a server. Users can return to their login portal again and again, making minor tweaks or major changes to the content as they wish. Every time they click “finished” or “upload”, the site becomes live and will immediately perform in the same manner regardless of how it was constructed. It’s the journey that varies, not the destination.
To help make your decision, we recommend playing around with our own site design tool and doing some research into the market-leading alternatives. However you choose to design and build your site, Midphase is ready to provide dependable and affordable hosting solutions tailored around your budget and requirements. Why not get in touch with us for more information?