Pam offers secure hosting and daily website maintenance to you at a fee of £14 a month
Or £168 per annum. This includes:-
- DAILY MAINTENANCE Your website is monitored every day updating plugins and themes, applying WordPress updates, clearing excess revisions and deleting any spam comments on your website. Some companies charge £100 a month for this service.
- SECURITY Installed on every website is the Lock Out Plugin which protects against global WordPress attacks and iThemes Security.
- BACKED UP Regular nightly automatic back ups with ‘BlogVault’ kept on the cloud. The website can be reinstalled by Pam in the unlikely event of it being hacked. (BlogVault would cost you $9 a month if you bought it for yourself)
- TOP CLASS HOSTING Pam is a Reseller with a top UK company, so pays for their business service. You get unlimited bandwidth. Their support is 24/7 if she encounters any problems with the sites that she manages.
- DOMAIN NAME renewed automatically by Pam annually. Ignore letters from America trying to charge you a high fee- they are trying to trick you!
If you want to go it alone this is what you will have to do:-
Setting Up Your Web Hosting Account
After you have your domain name, you need to set up your web hosting. The hosting service for your site is provided by companies referred to as web hosts. Web hosts provide you with a web server, disk space, and bandwidth, as well other services, including support. They charge a monthly fee for this service.
Disk space at a web host is not unlike the hard drive in your computer. It is, in essence, the amount of space you are allowed to use when storing files for your website. Normally, the amount of space provided is, at a minimum, about 5GB. This is more than sufficient for most websites, but if you plan on hosting video and pictures, you will eventually need more space.
Also, be aware of limitations in bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred between your site and your visitors; it is normally tracked over a monthly period. Web hosts generally offer large amounts of bandwidth with the even lower-end packages, but if you are hosting your own video and audio files and perhaps photos, your bandwidth can dwindle quickly and become a big problem. Hosting with Pam offers you unlimited band width.
Not all hosting companies are the same
There are special requirements for operating WordPress.org based websites. You need to make sure that your web host provides what you need. The requirements for hosting WordPress are PHP 7 and My SQL (version 4.1.2 or higher) as a minimum. Most web hosting companies do support these technologies “out of the box” without your even having to ask for them. Some hosting companies give you an option of which operating system you would like your site to run on (Linux or Windows).
If this means nothing to you let Pam handle it for you!
D-I-Y- Understanding Your Responsibilities
People may suggest that you need total control over your site, including the hosting. Although maintaining your own site gives you a larger degree of control, you need to consider your responsibilities. You need to:-
- Monitor for spam.
- Maintain your own backups.
- Keep up with software updates.
- Keep up with WordPress updates that are compatible with your chosen theme.
- Be aware that some plugins can wreck your website.
- Know what to do if you were hacked. This could cost you £200 to get it fixed. WordPress sites are vulnerable. According to Wordfence, a top security plugin, it’s not a question of if your site gets hacked, but when.
Backing up your website is crucial as if your site crashes you could lose all the content. Computers are not perfect and sooner or later a problem can occur. WordPress sites are vulnerable to hackers. Before you take on hosting your site yourself, would you know what to do if your site was hacked into or crashed?
Although plug-ins that can assist in everyday maintenance are available, having your own installation means you need to take an active role in maintaining your site. Is this task overwhelming? Normally not, but it does increase the amount of effort you put into managing your site.
Setting Up Your Domain Name
Part of setting up hosting for your site is setting up your domain name. Your domain name is your calling card. It is what people will remember, bookmark, or tell others when referring to your site. Therefore, it is important that you choose a name that is unique to you and your site.
Several sites can assist you in registering your domain, and several hosting companies not only register your domain, but also walk you through the entire process up to and including setting up your actual web space.