Hosting assistance
Skip the minefield…
Let’s not kid around… Finding an honest top-notch site host can be a pain in the arse.
Most hosting companies don’t own their own servers, they lie about their size and client numbers, and have too few staff on support.
Inspired Earth doesn’t have a massive data centre with hundreds of servers, and we’re not a hosting company.
We’re an end user like you.
Cloud servers and Hosting Stacks
We’re great fans of virtual servers in a cloud hosting environment (the likes of DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.).
They provide a low cost entry point, are readily scalable, and make load balancing (for really busy sites) a breeze. Basically, they offer an immense amount of flexibility, and can prove very cost effective. On top of that, it’s 100% your own hosting environment, meaning there’s no limitations around how it’s configured and optimised.
The only catch is you’ll need someone to manage the server, either from your own staff or a third party like Inspired Earth.
We can provide custom virtual server builds (Apache or Nginx stacks), deployment, and full management. We’d be happy to discus the options with you, helping you determine the best way forward.
Shared Hosting Advice
We’ve spent hundreds of hours (literally) identifying a number of really good hosting companies, suited to different needs. We asked them loads of technical server resource related questions (much to the frustration of some of the companies we investigated) in order to be sure we get what we think we’re paying for.
We hate having to migrate to a new host just because the one we’re with turns out to be a dud. Thankfully, we’ve only had to switch hosts four times between 1997 to 2020.
Although, for any serious ecommerce or business site, these days we mostly recommend cloud hosting (see above).
Content Distribution Networks
A content distribution network (CDN for short) is now a normal enhancement for any busy web site. It wasn’t that long ago only the big corporate players used a CDN, but those days are now gone. We can help optimise your site with full CDN integration.
Off-site Back-ups
All web sites should be regularly backed up. It’s fine to store minor application backups (like a WordPress backup) on the same server, but that’s not a replacement for regular off-site backups. Running a backup through WordPress can cause major slow-downs, and is known to bring some sites to a crawl. We recommend not involving the web site application in the actual backup process. It’s a task better handled by the server itself. We can help you get a fast, efficient, and secure back-up solution in place for your precious content.