Breakdown Of B2B Website Hosting

If you need a website, you need B2B web hosting. You’ve probably heard about domain names or DNS mapping. After providing support to people who we’ve designed and built websites for, I realize that a lot of folks either have trouble differentiating all these different pieces, or understanding how they work together to make a live website.

In this post, I’d like to break down how hosting works from a high-level, stripped-down view, and then talk a bit about how we handle hosting for our clients at BNP Engage.

What is B2B Website Hosting?

Your website is a glorified bundle of files, plain and simple.

wordpress files

Figure 1: Nothing glamorous here – basic WordPress 4.9.5 install
is just a lump of files like any other site.

You could download your website’s files in a zip folder, and you’d have them all. But you couldn’t type your website into a browser and visit it – it wouldn’t be live. Why? Because your files need to live on a server in order to make them accessible to users. When we search for a new home, we look for houses or apartments. Website files look for servers. Hosting is the process of housing these files on a server.

Where do Domain Names Come into Play?

Just like every house has an address, every server has an IP address. While IPs serve an important role in domain mapping, they’re long and difficult to remember. Try copy/pasting 66.135.216.190 into your browser now. Going to ebay.com is a lot easier, isn’t it?

That’s the beauty of domain names – they attach simple, easy-to-remember names to the location of your website’s files. You obtain a domain name from your registrar (i.e. GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc.) Our favorite is Amazon’s Route 53 since propagation times are blazing fast. GoDaddy is good too since it’s been around forever and is fairly well established.

The most important takeaway here is that your registrar is usually different from your web host. However, that does not have to be the case. You can have your registrar and web host remain the same,

A domain name won’t work unless it directs users to your server’s address where the website files live. This is all done in the domain’s zone files. (There’s lots to be read about this online already, and this blog post won’t dig that deep.)

DNS management

Figure 2: Zone files in the DNS Management portion of your registrar
(the place you bought your URL.)

TL;DR: Your registrar has your domain name, and your host has your site’s files on a server. Your domain name directs users to your site’s files on their server, which makes a website ‘live’.

Hosting at BNP Engage

We like to use WordPress for our clients because we believe that it gives them the best ROI on their purchase of a custom site. Since WordPress has become one of the most popular and widely-used CMS-es (Content Management Systems) on the web, many hosting companies have specialized in hosting WordPress sites exclusively.

We offer hosting packages tailored to suit the needs of the B2B sites we design and build. Here are a few features our hosting blog offers:

Automatic nightly backups. Make a mistake editing and get the white screen of death? No worries – push a button and roll back to a stable version of the site. Our automated daily backups and instant restorations let you breathe easy knowing your data is always preserved in case of emergency.
Dedicated Servers. Your site will live on a dedicated account with only sites we’ve built and managed. This means you’ll have better performance, security, and SEO results compared to shared-server hosting.
Duplicate staging Environment. A staging site is an exact replica of your website where you are free to make changes and test new features safely without impacting your live site.
Real-Time Security Threat Detection. With real-time threat detection and enterprise-grade infrastructure trusted by governments and Fortune 50 companies worldwide, you’re always secure. And an SSL certificate is all part of the package. Read it for yourself.

Optimized for speed. Your website is stored locally on servers all across the world, and our content delivery network (CDN) delivers data from the servers closest to your visitors. All of our websites are on a blazing fast, highly scalable architecture that allows our clients to host all of your assets up to 5GB. If you need more space, no problem! We can give you a custom storage solution.

What B2B Hosting Plan is Right For Your Business?

It all depends on what type of site you have or want! Here are our Hosting options.

Business Hosting should be used if you:

Are a small-to-medium sized business looking to advertise their services online
Handle most of your business outside of your website
Need a way to let your customers reach out to you online (contact form)
Aren’t looking for any type of e-commerce functionality
Have someone in-house who can handle maintenance and plugin updates
Are looking simply to have a presence online – what we like to call a ‘brochure site’

Here’s what you get with Business Hosting:

Dedicated account with only BNP Engage clients
Up to 5GB of storage
Content Delivery Network to optimize speed and performance, and server caching
FREE backup restorations

Business Hosting with CoreUX

If BNP Engage built your website, we use our CoreUX framework to unlock a variety of features and options to provide improved performance, flexibility, and ease of use.

All the features and benefits of Business Hosting, plus:
CoreUX theme license and access to updates
CoreElements plugin license and access to updates
Use of our licenses for Elementor, Elementor Pro, and other developer plugins used for performance, optimization and security

Get Business Hosting with Core UX

Premier Hosting should be used if you:

Need a shopping cart for your site
You require that your business is constantly monitored for uptime
Regularly have a large amount of traffic to your site
Are looking for eCommerce functionality (and an SSL certificate to go with it)
Need your site to be routinely monitored for security risks

Here’s what you get with Premier Hosting:

Dedicated account with only BNP Engage clients
Up to 5GB of storage
Content Delivery Network to optimize speed and performance
FREE backup restorations
FREE plug-in upgrades to keep your site up to date each month
FREE uptime monitoring via Pingdom
FREE integrated monitoring for out of date plugins

Premier Hosting with CoreUX