Hosting

As a digital design studio, Moogaloo offer a range of services to our clients. Photography, video production, SEO to name a few of the more fun and interesting ones. Another one is server hosting,  not so glamorous or easy for clients to get their heads round, but no less important. Sadly it's also the kind of thing that often gets overlooked when setting up a new site, often to significantly negative effect.

Often the temptation is to opt for a cheap package. They're easy to find. They offer free bandwidth, 10,000 email boxes and a few GB of storage space, all for just £4.99 a month. What they don't tell you is that your website will be sat on a stack of servers, the files scattered across them all, sharing space with thousands of other websites. When someone else's website gets hammered with high traffic, they all do, including yours. When one site's security is compromised, they all are.

If you think of your business as being a shop unit with fixtures & fittings, stock, staff and happy customers, think of hosting as being the utilities - the electricity, the running water, the waste disposal service. It's what sits behind the scenes, is often not that visible but is vital to the running of your premises. Moreover, when it starts playing up, it doesn't look good for your business - who wants to shop in a place that has lights and tills that don't work or rubbish piling up in the corner?

Hosting can also be likened to the strength of your doors and windows - it provides security. In the past few years, we've seen a few sites being hacked. Every instance has been on cheap, shared pool hosting - the kind of thing that looks a bargain on paper, and turned out to be a nightmare in reality. We've seen sites get hacked (at the hosting server level, not the CMS) and directing your visitors onto gambling and porn sites. We've seen sites slow down to a crawl. We've seen sites just stop working altogether when the hosting company decided to change some small setting that then breaks your site.

What we offer instead is space on one of Memset's Virtual Private Servers. We are given a specific allocation of space, bandwidth and resources and are left to manage these ourselves. If we want to install something on there, we can do that. There's a very specific wall around our server that provides security - the only people who share our hosting space is people we allow (ie our clients). As we grow and more clients use that space, it's easy for us to scale up those resources to always keep the sites running on there at optimum performance.

Of course, such hosting is more expensive than the shared pool options, but the saying "you get what you pay for" could've been written for the world of hosting, and we're always on hand to help get this stuff set up for you.