There are a lot of web hosting companies out there. The funny thing is, very few of them offer web design services. If your company website is hosted with one company, and receives web design services from another, consider what options your web designer has for you. There’s a chance you can consolodate both services and bring them under one roof – you’ll be doing yourself (and your web designer) a big favor.

You’ll find that your web designer may provide his/her own web hosting services. Hosting is expensive and extremely high-maintenance, and for this reason many designers do not host in-house. Instead, they rely on the bigger players (like Rackspace or  Peer1) to host their servers for them. Yes, you could go American Gangster and go straight to the source to host via Rackspace and Peer1 yourself, but then you’re cutting out your designer who’s responsible for the support of your website in the first place.

The Top 3 Benefits of Having Your Web Designer Host Your Website:

For these reasons alone, you may want to consider letting your web designer host your website:

1) Security/support:
Having your website hosted by your designer keeps everything under one roof. You’ll only have 1 phone call to make if you run into any issues. Your web designer knows your website best and is best-positioned to offer support.
2) Technology:
If your website is more advanced (for example contains a database, Content Management System (CMS), job board and/or data capture forms), you might be creating a headache for yourself if you host with someone other than your web designer. These bells & whistles are often built to run on specific server platforms and software with precise configurations, and not all servers/hosts are created equal. You’re better off deploying your website on your web designers server which is already custom-configured and ready to rock.
3) Hosting is a tricky business:
If/when something happens with your website (a server glitch, a virus, downtime, etc) you don’t need 2 vendors (a host and a web designer) pointing the finger at each other. Anything/everything service and support related should fall on your web designers lap, which is how most of us like it. Keep your web designer accountable and responsible for all web site related issues.