2017 Will be a Wild Year for Web Hosting – How to be Prepared

If you’re like most small business owners, the topic of web hosting likely bores you out of your mind – assuming you have any idea what web hosting even means. This is understandable. Most business owners are busy running their companies and have very little time to deal with the technical minutiae of domain names, web hosting, and all that goes with it. Unfortunately, I’ve seen this lack of knowledge come to haunt many business owners because not dealing properly with their web hosting can lead to a web outage or worse, the loss of their domain name! The main problem most business people have with their hosting is that they use a faceless, nameless company like GoDaddy to register their domain and host their web site. When problems arise, they must spend a lot of time on the phone explaining the issue and they have no one they can trust to help them. 2017 promises to be a wild year for web hosting, so it is important for all business owners to get clear on their web hosting information sooner than later.

Why will 2017 be a wild year for web hosting? There are a few factors but primarily it involves the evolution of one underlying web technology called PHP. I won’t get into the gory technical details, but the simple explanation is that many developers of web technologies (such as the very popular WordPress) are pushing for a new minimum supported version of PHP. To comply with the new minimum requirement will require many web site owners to perform an upgrade on their hosting provider, but most people will not know how to do that. In my research, this upgrade won’t even be possible for many people who have had their hosting package for several years and will require they sign up for a new one. Again, none of this is insurmountable, but most people will have no idea they need to do this and if they do, they really won’t have a clue of how to get it all done. For those brave souls who attempt to travel this road, they will undoubtedly spend many hours on the phone. Not to mention, if the process is not done correctly there are many opportunities for problems.

What Should You Do?

The first question most people will have is why bother with all these upgrades? The benefits are that the newer version of PHP helps make many web sites run faster. The downside to not upgrading PHP along with the systems that run on top of it are that security vulnerabilities abound. There are stories after stories of web sites that have been hacked because the systems that run those sites were not updated. Not paying attention to your web site is potentially disastrous for your business. So what can a business owner do?

The very first thing is to make sure you have all current information on your domain registration and web hosting, along with e-mail hosting. This means knowing what company holds your domain registration and which companies manage the servers that your web site and e-mail are running. This could be all one company or three different ones. Regardless, know specifically which company or companies hold your online life in the balance. This includes having working usernames and passwords so that you can log in and make changes and/or update billing information if necessary. If you don’t have this information at your fingertips, do what you must to get this information. Talk to your business partner or employees who may have handled it. If you had a company managing your web site for you, make sure you get this information from them. Even if another company is handling it for you, it is in your company’s best interest to also have this information. If you simply can’t find anything, talk to a trusted technology professional to help you investigate. I’m certainly willing to help you out if you don’t have anyone you trust. Just go to my contact page and send me a message.

Once you have the basic information on your domain registration and hosting arrangements in hand, the next thing to be sure of is to determine if you web site is a “traditional” site or if it runs on top of a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or other similar system. You will likely need to ask the person who created or manages your web site now, whether that is an employee or outside vendor. Again, if you don’t have anyone who can help with this, please talk to a trusted technology professional like myself. Doing nothing only makes your company vulnerable.

Once you know if your site is an old-school traditional site or runs on top of a CMS, you have just a few things left to do. First, if your site is traditional, you should consider moving to a CMS like WordPress. I won’t go into all the details here, but the use of a CMS like WordPress can make managing your site content a lot easier and make available to you many advanced web site functions quickly and inexpensively. I wrote an article on WordPress last year that has some more info. If your site is already running on a CMS then it becomes imperative that you talk to a trusted technology professional about keeping the site maintained from the technical side of things, which includes making sure your web hosting is capable of running the latest PHP versions.

Who You Gonna Call?

Over the last couple of years I’ve been setting up my own domain registration system and private web hosting for my clients. This allows me to bypass all the middle men of companies like GoDaddy and deal with issues directly and expediently. My clients can then contact me to handle any issues that may arise, such as the PHP issue I describe in this article, assuming I haven’t already proactively taken care of it for them. Needless to say, all my clients are already taken care of and do not need to worry about their web hosting in 2017. If you do not know of anyone you can trust to manage your company’s domain registration and web hosting, I am happy to talk to you and determine if my services might be a good fit for you. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need help or have questions.