The Top 5 Web Hosting Trends for 2017
With technology increasing every day and web hosting getting more and more advanced, there are a lot of different hosting trends to be on the lookout for in 2017! Listed below are some of the hottest things that you should pay attention to this year!
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Managed WordPress Hosting
If you have a WordPress website, there’s no doubt that you need good hosting. Sure, WordPress can run on mediocre hosting, but it won’t run well. This will be more apparent if you end up getting even a moderate amount of traffic to your WordPress site on a cheap hosting plan—there just isn’t enough power (or memory/CPU) to handle all of the SQL database queries alone.
That said, if you’re really looking to up your ante in 2017 and have your WordPress site performing in a stellar fashion, you should consider WordPress hosting that is built specifically for WordPress. This type of hosting is often called Managed WordPress Hosting, because not only do managed hosts typically take care of everything for you in terms of support but their entire infrastructure is designed to do one thing well—run WordPress!
With that said, in 2017 people who are serious about their WordPress sites will be increasingly moving to a managed setup, so if you’re serious about your WordPress site, it’s definitely something to consider this year.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is sort of an overused term in the tech world. “Cloud anything” is a common buzzword, and is also something that gets tossed around on every blog you read. Simply put, “the cloud” refers to a network of computers that is grouped together to provide virtual instances of servers that are not physically dependent upon a single server or machine. This helps with increased reliably, speed, and performance.
That said, more hosting companies are offering hosting “in the cloud,” while other companies are just using this buzz term and don’t actually offer true cloud hosting. In 2017, this type of hosting is becoming very popular due to its low price and high level of reliability.
In our experience, the best hosting company for true cloud-based web hosting is Cloudways. They do a great job of putting their management interface onto a cloud instance to make it easier to use, so you don’t need a PhD in network topology just to figure it out! We took the time to review Cloudways, which is worth checking out if you’re interested in cloud hosting.
DIY Website Builders/Hosts
In 2017, one of the more popular ways to build a website is to use a DIY website builder/host. Examples of companies that offer this would be Wix.com and Squarespace. Both of them offer the option to easily build a website without much technical knowledge (using a WYSIWYG builder), and even map your domain to their subdomain in order to have your own domain name but still use their platform.
In fact, these platforms are so popular that they each took out a Super Bowl ad…and everyone knows how expensive those ads are. Here’s the Wix.com Super Bowl ad:
And the Squarespace ad:
These platforms are great for novice website builders but may be quite lacking for someone who has the experience and technical knowledge to work with servers and web hosting. That said, if you’re interested in either of them they might be worth a try as long as you aren’t someone who needs a ton of customizations on your site.
Data Security
With cyber attacks on the rise year after year, data security is becoming more and more of a concern. If you’re a company that stores data on your web server, you really need to be conscious of security and make sure that a variety of security measures are taken to protect that data in 2017.
One of the most important things that you can do for protecting your data is to spend the money on a quality web host. The cheap hosting companies just don’t keep bad actors in check on their servers, don’t patch holes in server software, and a whole bunch of other issues that can lead to massive security problems. Spending the money on good quality hosting is one way to potentially save yourself a big hassle down the road.
DDoS Mitigation
In recent years, DDoS attacks have become more common with many high profile companies being affected by them. For those who don’t know, a DDoS attack, also called Distributed Denial of Service Attack, is essentially when a malicious person floods your server with so many requests at once that it can’t keep up and crashes.
In 2017 there are an increasing amount of web hosting companies that are offering DDoS protection as an upgraded option on their hosting plans. Liquidweb is one of these companies, but there are a variety of others. If you have a site that you think might be a potential DDoS target, you may want to consider using a host that offers this type of protection as DDoS attacks are a real and serious threat this year.
