Complete Martial Arts Blog

Now that you’ve decided to start your own martial arts website, what kind of hosting do you need?

Before you choose to go with a hosting company, you need to figure out your hosting need, so you can do apple to apple comparison.

Hosting companies offer several options. The most popular and cheapest option is Shared.

The advantage of shared hosting is that they put your website on a same server with hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites. Since all the websites are sharing the same server, you also share the cost of that server so the cost is very minimum, less than $10/month and sometimes even less.

The disavdantage of shared hosting is that sometimes you don’t have full access to the server root directory, since you are sharing with all others they can’t let you mess up for everybody else. This may or may not be a problem to most people. Other disadvantage is that your website may load a bit slower since other sites are being loaded at the same time. For this reason, if your site gets too much traffic, your hosting company will either tell you to move to more expensive hosting plan, if they are nice, or just kick you off their server, if they are nasty.

When you are getting too much traffic to share with other websites, you can choose to have the entire server to yourself. This option is called Dedicated Server Hosting, and can be very expensive depending on what type of server configuration you choose, and can run several hundred dollars a month.

The advantage is, you have full control over your server and you can host any many sites as you want and not have to share with anybody. You might even notice that your website loads faster on its own dedicated server.

The disavantage is obviously the cost and you may need some knowledge of running a web server. If not, there are hosting companies that offer you assistance. (Some may charge you separately while others just include it with your hosting fee)

And if you are too big for Shared but Dedicated Server is too much, some hosting companies offer you something in the middle called VPS, Virtual Private Server. Basically, it is still a shared hosting but you only share with 3 or 4, not hundreds and thousands of websites. You still get the full access to the server root and enjoy the full benefit of a dedicated server at fraction of cost, since you are sharing with few other guys in similar situation. The price is typically under $100/month.

For our website, we started off with shared hosting initially. However, as our traffic grew and our revenue grew, it made sense for us to move to a dedicated server. We did have few problems during UFC events when our site brought down the entire shared server so they “made” us move to a dedicated server few years ago. We still have plenty of capacity on this sever for this website so we also host many of our other sites on this server as well. So far, we’ve upgraded twice to a faster machine with more memory and we should be OK for now.

The lesson here is, the hosting cost is minimal compared to running your business. If you have outgrown your old shared hosting, make the smart investment to dedicated server or faster server to grow with your business.

Maybe we will discuss hosting companies at a later time.

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