What Does My Monthly Hosting Charge Include?
Hosting is the backbone of all services we provide you, and you may be wondering what is included in Dentist Identity’s monthly fee. Rest assured, your site is optimized for our hosting environment and is monitored to ensure that your website is secure, stable and healthy. Read on for more details of what our experts do for you behind the scenes every day, broken down by the three main goals for your website:
Security
Safety
SpeedPart 1: SecurityYour website is protected by multiple levels of security; think of it as a filter. At the top of the filter is the entire worldwide web with all of its risks. We first pass information coming from the web through CloudFlare’s infrastructure. If you have looked at your DNS settings, you may have noticed that the nameservers for your domain point to xxx.ns.cloudflare.com.
CloudFlare is an intelligent global network that protects and accelerates your website. Spammers, bots, denial of service and brute force attacks are all repelled before they reach our servers. Therefore, blacklisting the offenders at the IP level; dramatically reducing attacks, hacks, and spam.
On top of CloudFlare’s ever-reactive technology, Dentist Identity adds another level of optimization and security to your website. Information that passes through the first layer of the filter and gets to our servers hits our load balancer first. Think of this level as a gateway to our other servers. All traffic must pass through this before it can reach your website. The load balancer can tell the difference between bots and human users. It tracks who is accessing our servers and when, and creates its own additional blacklists for an added layer of security.
Furthermore, we incorporate additional levels of security procedures to maintain the integrity and safety of your website.
Part 2: Safety
Our load balancers and servers have also passed stress tests to prove that they remain functional even under rigorous circumstances, such as a sudden burst of extra traffic. This often shuts down other servers -- something you may have witnessed with other websites. However, our servers stay up and barely slow down under these conditions.
Even the best web hosting providers aren't immune to having servers go down. This is why Dentist Identity also employs backup servers that allow us to backup your site daily, with a 10-day running inventory. If our main servers go down for any reason, we can quickly recreate your site and database from the backup. This allows your site to stay live while we fix any issues with the main server -- and is also why it is vital for Dentist Identity to manage your domain name.
Part 3: SpeedPerhaps the most visible feature of Dentist Identity’s hosting environment is our optimized load speed. Load speed simply refers to the amount of time it takes for any page on your website to load. This is a crucial component of a site’s usability and Google considers it an important ranking factor for search results.
A site with a slow load speed not only discourages viewers from sticking around but also negatively impacts your search rankings.“For anyone that is interested in developing a high-quality website that real people actually read, you need to understand that loading times are a huge issue in terms of SEO. If your website takes a long time to load and your bounce rate increases drastically, Google will lower your rankings.”
Web hosting review company TBWHS.comWhile most WordPress sites utilize cPanel and Apache, Dentist Identity adds Nginix and Varnish Cache to speed up your site. We also take advantage of CloudFlare’s CDN (Content Delivery System) of multiple servers across the world to optimize for speed.
If you’re not familiar with these technologies, don’t worry; Dentist Identity’s experts are. We have thoroughly researched and tested all the options available to put together the optimal combination that gives your website the fastest load times, highest search engine rankings, best user experience.
Static URLs vs Dynamic URLs
We also build your site structure with static URLs which are more SEO friendly than dynamic URLs
A static URL uses permalinks with keywords, making it easy for the viewer to recognize what is on that page. It is also indexed more quickly by search engines and therefore ranks higher.
A dynamic URL usually has characters like: ? = & and are typically very long, making them nearly impossible to write down manually and share on a business card and are challenging (if not impossible) to remember. They do not typically create an accurate expectation of what the user will see prior to reaching the page.