Web Hosting

Web hosting refers to storage space on a physical server. Along with storage space for your website files, your website also has access to the server’s memory and CPU. Specialised software on the server allows your website to be displayed on the public internet, and for visitors to interact with your website.

There are different types of web hosting available:

Shared web hosting. The hosting product you’ll find on this page refers to shared web hosting, or simply ‘shared hosting’. It is a hosting account on a server which is shared with other hosting accounts, or ‘tenants’.

Public cloud hosting. Or simply ‘cloud hosting’ or a ‘virtual machine’ is another type of shared hosting. However, unlike conventional shared hosting, you get a full virtual machine in the cloud with resources dedicated to your website. Another benefit of cloud hosting is that it is more tolerant of hardware failures, and resources can be added or removed as needed.

Dedicated server hosting. Where hardware is shared with other tenants in conventional shared hosting and public cloud hosting, dedicated server hosting gives you your very own hardware and software. Because of this, dedicated servers can be more powerful than public cloud servers.

Private cloud hosting. Combine the cloud with dedicated servers, and you get your own fault tolerant cluster of servers. It is, for all intents and purposes, a cloud installation, but on hardware where you are the only tenant.

With Storm you get a free .co.uk domain with your web hosting account. If you already have a domain hosted elsewhere, we’ll transfer it to Storm for free.

Not sure what domain to register? Here are a few tips:

• Keep it short. The shorter your domain name, the easier it is to remember. Although there are various takes on the subject, a general rule of thumb is to keep your domain name three syllables or shorter.
• Use a familiar name. There are exceptions to any rule, and that includes domain name length. If people know your business name as “Annabelle’s Wedding Cakes”, then registering annabellesweddingcakes.co.uk is perfectly fine.
• Don’t use numbers. Unless you really have to, that is. The problem with numbers is that you could lose out on traffic if someone decides to spell out the numbers in your domain name. There’s a big difference between my247site and mytwentyfoursevensite.
• Think ahead. Avoid homophones (words that sound the same)and words that are hard to spell.

Back in the days before Google remembering domain names was important, and these were important rules to follow. But with most of our browsing going through search engines, these are simply recommendations.

All Storm servers are backed up regularly. However, these are system-wide backups we keep aside as part of our disaster recovery strategy. Self-managed accounts (e.g. shared hosting) that do not have managed backups in place should manually backup their website data and files. Please remember to delete backup files once you have downloaded them to your computer since they can take up a lot of space.

If you have a fully-managed account (e.g. managed WordPress or a managed cloud server) then you don’t have to worry about backups since we’re taking care of it behind the scenes.

Your shared web hosting account can host one true domain. This is your primary domain. But your hosting account supports unlimited aliases. These are add-on domains which can be used to host additional websites. With add-on domains the folder where you store your website files is located within your primary domain’s folder.

But should you host multiple websites on your shared hosting account? Your account may only have a limited number of resources available to ensure that all tenants on the server get their equal share of available computing resources.

With too many websites in your shared hosting account you risk compromising the performance of each individual site. This can negatively affect the visitor experience and undermine your search engine (SEO) performance.

If you want to host multiple websites talk to us about getting your own fully-managed virtual server.

Yes you can. Choose the Linux Go option above for your WordPress website or blog. It includes PHP and MySQL – everything you need to run a WordPress website.

Storm also provides purpose-built managed WordPress hosting that’s fully optimised for WP websites and blogs. It’s ideal for beginners and WordPress experts alike since it takes on the tech burden, and takes care of all those time-consuming tasks like updates and backups.

Unlike shared hosting, Storm’s fully-managed WordPress is hosted in containers (similar to virtual servers) that allow for resource scaling – add more resources to handle peak traffic times, or scale down during the quiet hours.

One other feature that sets Storm’s managed WordPress hosting apart from shared hosting is the one-click staging site feature. A staging site is an identical copy of your production (live) website that can be used to test new designs and features and plugins before applying them to your live website.

Plus, you get all the WordPress technical expertise you’ll ever need. No more scratching your head about strange errors or site behaviour – just pass it on to support.

Learn more about Storm’s managed WordPress hosting.