Setting up a website - Performance / Security Considerations

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Conshine

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I am setting up a website for a small business, I am going to be registering it this week.
It will be maybe 10 pages or so and I dont expect many silmultaneous hits, if any, but hopefully I will get a fair bit of traffic eventually.
What do I need to do to ensure that it performs well, apart from the obvious image optimisation etc.
It wont be graphic heavy, but I have been to many plain looking non-professional sites that are very slow.
Why is this?
Surely this is the hosting company's hardware and nothing I could do about it?
Do the hosting company's give any guarantee on the performance?
Are some better than others, or are they all the same?
Also, regarding performance, say for some reason, likely to be malicious, I get thousands of hits in a short space of time.
How can I be sure that my site will perform under heavy load?
I know that some sites can be brought down by this.
Again, is it the site that is brought down, or the web page itself?
Same with security - Anything I can do here, or is is the hosting company's job?
Thanks
 
Hi Conshine,

Security: It really depends on what kind of thing the site is set up for. Lets say you want to sell stuff. The credit card end of things is usually done elsewhere on another more robust site. You wouldn't be storing customer bank details on your site.
Hosting: Here, you get what you pay for. It's a case of choosing a reputable hosting company and getting a decent package for your needs but it shouldn't cost the earth for a small website.
The slow speed of the sites you looked at could be caused by a number of factors from the computer you yourself are using to the design of the site (size of images) etc. It's probably not caused by an inferior hosting service.
Hosting Companies should give some sort of service level agreement but as can be seen recently with a popular forum that we all love, the host can let you down!
Spreadsheet
 
Thanks for your reply!
No credit card functionality will be on it, its purely to show services available etc.
Performance - Ok, I understand.

One more question on this - What about images?
Do I need to create my own images, or can I copy from other sites?
Obviously I would not use anything that is an obvious infringement, but say a picture of a building, or for example, a picture of an iPad, or the Internet Explorer or Firefox logos, where I am illustrating that I can provide a service that supports this browser.
Can I just copy it and use these, or am I breaking the law?

Thanks!
 
If its only 10 static (readonly) HTML pages you dont need to worry about security or performance. Security is provided by your host (i.e. where your HTML is physically stored).

Performance issues dont really exist when just loading static pages i.e. its negligible compared to accessing backend database, external web services etc., which you wont be doing.

Just design the pages, dump them into the secure storage area of the hosting company and away you go.

Also take note of your domain e.g. .ie or .com etc. If you are targetting an Irish audience its usually bset to get a .ie domain but you must have/register a company, which is very simple.

If the pictures are copyrighted you need to get permission.
 
username123 said:
Also take note of your domain e.g. .ie or .com etc. If you are targetting an Irish audience its usually bset to get a .ie domain but you must have/register a company, which is very simple.
Click to expand...

The company that controls policy for .ie (The IEDR) has relaxed this: this is certainly still a category that is sufficient, but there are plenty of others too (personal name, publication name, ...). For a quick guide to what kinds of name you can register, here's a link to their [broken link removed]
 
It will usually say it at the bottom or somewhere on the page, or if there's a © symbol and a year on the page.
 
ALL material is copyright unless the person holding the copyright grants you the right to use it or they specifically place it in the public domain and even then, they may still place restrictions on it's - often preventing its use for commercial purposes.
 
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