AAWH / Web Hosting

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Today's websites are very different from their equivalent from the 90's and from the site as we knew them between 2000 and 2010. 10 or 15 years ago the web pages consisted mostly of textual content and some images. Nowadays they feature videos, various real time communication elements, social networking content and mostly dynamic content and real time integration with databases.

As of 2019 most websites one can find around the web are classified as Web 2.0 generation. This means that many of them have an user-generated content and are interoperable. The modern website is integrated and works well with a number of digital products, and remote systems. One of the important things is that it should be user friendly on any kind of computing devices. Unlike the websites, as they were 10 or 15 years ago, the websites of our decade and those of the next one are and will be mobile friendly and easy to use on tablets and mobile phones.

The process of creating a website, management and the technical administration after it goes online has long been something that web designers and web developers used to do. Website owners have usually used web hosting companies just as providers of online storage for their websites. Web hosting account management panels - such as cPanel, CentOS Web Panel, ISPConfig, Vesta CP, Froxlor and many others - have made the management of the web hosting accounts and the server-side site management quite easy. This made many site owners to administer websites themselves.

The result of the development of the WW technologies is that people have taken control over the management of their websites. This has happened with the introduction of the Content Management Systems (CMS). As of today, the most popular of them is WordPress (WP). The CMS allow website owners to create, publish and edit content using visual interfaces, similar to the most business applications such as Microsoft Word or Apple’s iPages.

Despite that it is much more easier to administer your website today than it was 10 or 15 years ago, the technologies have evolved a lot and have become a whole ecosystems. As a result of that the IT management and maintenance of a WordPress based website now requires a lot of work. The owners need to secure their WordPress installations, to do regular updates of the WordPress itself and the software applications (something which requires a website backup to be made before the upgrades), to update of the visual templates (WordPress design themes) and to perform many other technical tasks. Some of them aren't hard to do, but others often result in the website CMS to crash or make certain services or parts of to stop working properly.

There are 2 different options to get a managed website service.

The first one is to use a web designer or developer, including those who have created the website it or to use a Managed Website Hosting service. Web Designers and developers are always busy working on the next project. Most of them don't do website maintenance themselves, which means that very often the website owners cannot get technical support when they need it.

The second option is to use a Managed service from the web hosting provider that hosts the website. There are many benefits of doing that.

The difference between a Managed Website service and Self-Managed Web Hosting?

Some websites which have databases and a lot of content use Content Management Systems (CMS). Others are build on simple HMTL code. In someone wants to have a simple presentational website, HTML-based site is a better option as it does not require software updates and it’s code is will be clean and readable by the Search Engines. it will also open faster than the CMS based websites. If a website owners needs to publish a lot of content and organize it, one definitely needs to have a database and to use a CMS.

In both scenarios Managed Website Hosting is a service which outsources the technical and system administration of the web hosting account and website to the hosting provider. The difference between Self-Managed Web Hosting and Managed Websites is that with the Self-Managed service web hosts provide server-side support only.

With the Managed Website services the providers go extra-mile and do client-side support. This means that they manage everything from the HTML code, onsite SEO (Meta Tags optimization and other SEO tasks), CMS and database management, updates, take care of the security of the website and all software apps and do certain website design and coding work for they customers.The good thing about Managed Website service is site owners save time on technical administration and can focus on their business, while someone who has the knowledge to managed web servers and sites works for them. So, to make it short, even built on WordPress, Managed sites are much better option for those site owners who value their time and want to focus on growing their business.