A mobile app will struggle to exist without a hosting solution. Your mobile application needs support processing and storing data, distributing resources, and swiftly responding to users’ requests. Thus, a reliable hosting solution is able to strengthen your app’s performance and security. Some providers even offer hosting plans with additional security, such as VPS with anti-DDoS protection. But there are many said hosting solutions and it may be hard to pick the right one among them. To help you spot dependable hosting services, we have created this guide. Keep on reading!
Why the Choice of Hosting Matters for a Mobile App
Let’s start with the functionality a hosting solution provides for a mobile app. For an app, what hosting services do is they:
- Store data: Information on your mobile app, such as user data, app content, and media, has to be stored somewhere, and servers of a hosting provider are where it is collected.
- Keep the app online: Hosting supports your application by giving it resources to stay online, handle traffic, and process user requests.
- Offer necessary communication with backend servers: To sustain their functioning, mobile apps interact with Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) that are hosted on servers.
Now that we understand what hosting does for a mobile app let’s look at how to choose a hosting solution for your mobile application.
What to Pay Attention to When Choosing a Hosting Solution
The first thing you need to do, even before you start looking up hosting providers, is measure the needs of your app, so that you have a starting point of minimal requirements. Next, it’s important to evaluate the offerings each hosting provider has. Here, you need to pay attention to the following characteristics.
Speed and Performance
The overall performance of your app, which will be most noticeable in the loading speed, depends on the speed and performance of the servers you host your app on.
When looking through the hosting plans, pay attention to the specifications of the server associated with each hosting plan, and the overall infrastructure, which includes data centers, where the mentioned servers will reside. Also, take into account types of caching mechanisms and the support of a specific content delivery network.
Storage Amount
Everything the app contains is deployed and stored on the servers used in a hosting solution. In some cases, the materials associated with an app are numerous and thus require sufficient storage space.
Pay attention to the storage amount you get with a specific hosting plan, and evaluate whether it’s suitable for you.
Scalability Options
Your mobile app can unexpectedly experience an increase in traffic, and to sustain good application performance, you might need to upgrade your hosting plan. The opposite situation may occur: you may find that you don’t quite need or use the resource power that comes with your hosting plan, and you might want to align the resources you get to what you use.
Make sure that the one you’ll end up with has enough scalability options with an easy process of scaling the resource ladder up or down.
Uptime Guarantee
Uptime is probably one of the most important metrics when it comes to hosting since it measures the time a server is online and operational, and so are the applications or websites hosted on it.
Uptime guarantee refers to how much time a hosting provider promises your server will be online, powering up your mobile application. The industry standard uptime is 99%, so pay attention to those vendors that offer a guarantee close to that percentage.
Security Measures
Mobile applications collect a lot of personal and sensitive data. The data is then forwarded from an app to a server, where it is stored. That’s why a hosting solution must offer some security measures. Examples can be regular or automated backups, DDoS protection, SSL encryption, and powerful systems of virus detection and general monitoring.
If a hosting provider doesn’t specify any security measures it applies, we recommend moving further in your search.
What Type of Hosting Do You Need?
Each hosting option has its pros and cons, so we advise you to carefully evaluate them when deciding.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting implies that your app will be hosted on a server with other users and their projects. You’ll share server resources with others, which promotes instability in terms of resource distribution, and possible irregularities in your performance.
Shared hosting is affordable, that’s why we recommend going with it if you’re on a budget and don’t have a resource-demanding application. If the opposite is true, you’ll find shared hosting rather limiting.
Dedicated Hosting
Hosting with dedicated servers refers to giving a user an entire physical server that will direct all its power to your application. With such a hosting option, you’ll get complete server control, and security enhanced by the isolated environment you get with a dedicated server.
Dedicated hosting is expensive, the most expensive out of all hosting options. So, we recommend choosing to host with the dedicated server when you know that your mobile app requires a significant amount of resources and maximum indicators of uptime and security. Otherwise, you may get the power, the full scope of which you won’t use.
VPS (Virtual Private Server)
VPS hosting is considered a middle option between shared and dedicated hosting. With a virtual private server, you get the resources of a dedicated server, which is still shared with other users; only in this case, you get a completely isolated environment without many of the performance and security concerns of shared hosting.
We recommend going with VPS if you want a secure and powerful enough option, without investing a lot or committing to it. VPS hosting is also very scalable, which means that you can adjust the amount of resources you get any time you want.
