Hosting requirements, guidelines, and suggestions

Your guide to a good web hosting service provider

Getting your web hosting service provider right is just as crucial as finding the right web design and web development partner. At Grayscale, we primarily work with WordPress, the most popular open source content management system (CMS) in the world.

WordPress provides our clients access to a professional website that is easy to manage, but it does come with a number of requirements. Other CMSs or platforms are likely to have similar requirements on web hosting, so you can also use this as a reference even if you are not intending to use WordPress or work with Grayscale at the moment.

To ensure a smooth web development process, we advise our clients consider the following guidelines prior to registering any web hosting services:

Choosing a host — “the server”

Before you build your website, you need a place to put it. Consider it the building lot before your contractor puts down your house — it needs to conform to a number of requirements set by your contractor, otherwise the construction may go wrong halfway in due to unforeseen problems with the lot. It is imperative that the foundation of your house, as well as your website, is stable.

When choosing your web host, you will quickly find there are a large number of companies offering this service. If you’re primarily targeting audience in Hong Kong or Asia, we highly recommend getting a service provider with data centres in the Asia-Pacific area, e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, or Tokyo.

Our hosting requirements

Every website is different, so we can’t tell you for sure which package is the most appealing. We can tell you, however, that the package must contain the following aspects if you’re working on WordPress:

Linux-based server
PHP version 7.4 or greater
PHP support for cURL, DOM, GD, JSON, Multibyte String and XML
MySQL version 5.7 or greater, or MariaDB version 10.3 or greater
Apache with mod_rewrite module enabled, or Nginx
HTTPS support

Furthermore, you need to consider the disk space required for your website — the more multimedia content (e.g. Hi-res images, videos, etc.) you want to store, the more disk space you need. If you choose to let your web hosting service provider store your emails, you will need to allocate disk space to that as well.

If you’re unsure what these things mean, contact your web hosting service provider’s customer support and send them our requirements. They should be able to guide you through their purchase.

Our suggestions

We know it is difficult to select a web hosting company if you are new to this, so we have made a little tool below to help ease your pain. Before you head off, some reminders:

Grayscale does not provide any web hosting service in any way to prevent vendor lock-in, nor will we configure the web hosting environment unless strictly instructed to do so. You will need to provide access to an adequate web hosting based on the requirements listed above.
Extra charges may incur if the web hosting environment provided at the time of development is not adequate, or is not in compliance with the requirements listed above.

Now, let’s see what your potential options are:

"*" indicates required fields

Do you have IT staff who are experienced in and wiling to managing a web server?*

Yes

What level of support do you need?*

Email and ticketing

24/7 live support

What level of service and investment do you have in mind?*

Minimal

Premium

Corporate

You need someone to help handle any server-related issues, so we recommend going for a managed web hosting solution. Do be mindful that the scope of service is positively related to your investment.

Since your IT staff is capable of handling a web server, you have a lot of options. The key is how much you are willing to pay so you can offload the hassle to a service provider.

With the level of service and investment you’re envisioning, you could go for a local vendor. One of the service providers we’ve worked with is Wshow Network Solutions, who offers a very competitive package. They’re only taking on client by referral, so if you need a quote, please let us know.

A little bit of investment can get you to WP Engine, which is a fairly versatile service provider. They offer a variety of plans that can be customised according to your needs.

If sophistication and stability are what you need, then you want to make sure you’re in good hands. Pagely has proven to provide the best-in-class hosting and support service. Their price range might seem higher, but if you tally up the optional features from other service providers, it is more or less the same. Their portfolio is the most promising one, targeting only corporates and enterprise level clients.

Alternatively, if your IT team can actively engage in server management, you could opt for a cloud computing solution. They allow you to scale up or down quickly, and some of the plans are charging based on usage — the more you consume, the more you pay. To name a few, check out Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Linode.

Should you need help with the server and the IT team can’t fix it, you can purchase their support plans for additional help.

Need more help or want a quote? Talk to your account manager if you are our existing client, or fill out the contact form for a new project with new hosting.

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