How to choose the best platform for website development

For efficient website and application development, it is crucial to have stable and high performing servers providing a suitable environment to developers. Any technical issues will affect the development process negatively, slow down the flow of work and require additional resources. Recurring problems may seal the fate of many promising web businesses. On the other hand, with flawlessly performing servers, there's no need to employ additional staff. Instead, the programmers can focus on developing their websites and applications to perfection.

Hosting on your own servers

Suppose an individual developer or company decides to run their own servers. They will need to set up their server hardware to an existing data centre or build their own on-premise. This obviously means additional costs but also less flexibility of use and might not be feasible for a single programmer with limited server management experience. Similarly, most small and medium-sized businesses have neither time and resources nor proper expertise to build their servers from scratch. Moreover, relying upon own hardware and a single data centre, usually local, restricts the scope of the website or application to a certain extent only to a local audience. Therefore, any company considering entering a serious development business should opt-in for provided hosting services.

Shared hosting vs cloud hosting

Shared hosting services are usually cheaper and might be an option for less experienced users. However, there are several reasons why they are not an ideal option for website developers or development companies. Firstly, all the resources are shared with other users, which brings down both your websites' performance and security. The resources you get are not able to adjust flexibly to a sudden increase in traffic. In the worst case, you might lose valuable customers or whole business deals due to downtime or lagging performance. Additionally, in a shared environment, you have to rely on other people's behaviour in relation to security threats. Due to risky actions other than your own, your website or application can be vulnerable to attacks and malware. On top of that, shared web hosting doesn't usually offer SSH access. The most individually customisable hosting environment for programming is cloud hosting. Not only it offers maximum speed, reliability and adaptability to a variety of development tasks and customers – you can scale up or down immediately, according to your needs, but it also ensures support of coding languages you might work with. The shared hosting plans will not necessarily allow you to code in, for example, Python or Node.js. On the other hand, in cloud hosting, you can choose your own environment and tools.

Benefits of cloud hosting for website development

Whether your web development business is up and running or you're just in the initial phase, hopefully, this article gave you an idea about what to expect from different hosting options. The indisputable benefits of cloud hosting are unparalleled performance, maximum customisation, including easy scalability and automation, security without compromises and personal support. If you would like to know more, please get in touch with our Sales team or read a more detailed article on this topic. [button style="Primary" text="Contact Sales Team" url="https://upcloud.com/contact/"]