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Why Atlantic BT switched to our own shared cloud hosting.

Each business requires a unique hosting infrastructure to suit their needs. At Atlantic BT, we’ve seen many issues arise when businesses choose the wrong solution. They frequently come to us to help them minimize costs, recover from a security breach, or prevent future threats.

We’ve customized two primary hosting options to serve clients: shared cloud hosting and AWS. While many people believe that shared hosting is only meant for small businesses, we find it is a good option for any company that doesn’t have specialized requirements.

In fact, our shared hosting is so trustworthy, we recently migrated our own website from AWS to shared hosting.

What value will I recognize from shared cloud hosting?

Shared clouds are affordable and, when set up correctly, provide businesses with the security and performance needed to run smoothly.

Atlantic BT uses LightSpeed Web Server and has built a custom infrastructure on Liquid Web. We limit servers to 30 websites, reducing risks of outages.

While some people are hesitant to start out with shared hosting as they anticipate rapid growth, it’s fairly simple for our team to switch over to AWS. You could save some money by starting out with a shared option.

What happened when Atlantic BT switched to shared hosting?

We took some time to reevaluate our hosting setup with two primary goals in mind: reduce costs and boost performance. Initially, we were using a standard LAMP setup in AWS, paying $650 month.

Switching from Apache to LiteSpeed Web Server gave us some immediate benefits with performance. This proprietary web server software is a popular choice, built with modern architecture in mind. Google recommends using modern web hosting software that supports newer optimized protocols, like LiteSpeed. For this reason, implementing LiteSpeed can also give you some SEO benefits.

Combining LiteSpeed with our shared hosting platform meant that Atlantic BT reduced monthly costs by over 80% and page load from 4.1 to 1.8 seconds.

When should you use AWS vs. shared hosting?

In most situations, shared cloud hosting will be sufficient for your business. AWS is essential for businesses with the following requirements:

  • Regulatory compliance: For example, Healthcare of Financial businesses must be HIPAA and FISMA compliant.
  • Large need for scaling and load balancing: If your business has large surges of traffic compared your normal traffic, you may benefit from AWS.
  • Custom environments: If you need a custom environment to support custom languages, libraries, architectures, or the ability to scale; AWS is a good option. However, these custom environments are more expensive and may require more time to manage.

Use our checklist for evaluating shared hosting providers.

Shared hosting can be a great option when set up correctly. When evaluating providers, be sure to ask the following questions:

  1. How many websites are on a server? Packing too many websites on one server means they are competing for bandwidth. As a result, a surge on one website could impact all. Furthermore, this could create security risks.
  2. Does the plan have sufficient disk space and bandwidth? Unlimited plans are a buffet of disk space and bandwidth, but they often are lower quality and performance than a metered plan.
  3. What type of support is available? Make sure your provider has 24/7 support. And also – do they charge extra for support?
  4. Do they charge extra for standard elements? For example, some hosts will charge extra for backups or SSL certificates.
  5. What is the process to migrate to another host? Many plans include a domain name for free, but they tie the domain name to the provider and make it difficult to leave. Even then, you usually have to commit (and pay) for a year of hosting to receive the domain name for free.
  6. And don’t forget – see what other people are saying about this shared hosting option! See if other people using this provider have any issues. If so, have they provided a fix or update?

Interested in learning more?

If you want to learn more about which type of environment is best for your business, we’re here to help. Contact us to get started.

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