I have designed many websites and worked with a variety of hosting configurations. “Elite-Fitness” websites typically use a blogging platform such as WordPress and daily receive large spikes of traffic from their regular members who are checking the workout of the day.  Their websites must be fast, responsive, and able to handle the traffic spikes.

There are a wide range of options available to owners of “Elite-Fitness” boxes that fulfill their needs in varying degrees. This article is a run-down of them and their features.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting companies, such as HostGator, provide unlimited storage space and bandwidth, and have an adequate setup for a single “Elite-Fitness” box.  I recommend HostGator because they are inexpensive, fast, have helpful support, and are very reliable.

HostGator provides three different plans, but only the latter two should be considered: “Baby Plan” and “Business Plan”.  Both plans offer the following features pertinent to “Elite-Fitness” websites:

• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Control Panel with Backups
• FTP access
• POP3 and SMPT email
• supports WordPress and other popular blogging platforms

They also offer some things you might not need, like unlimited domain names, subdomains, and MySQL databases.

The “Business Plan” offers these two extra features, absent from the “Baby Plan”:

• Private dedicated IP address
• SSL Certificate

Your domain name (e.g. “mega”Elite-Fitness”.com”) points to a numerical IP address, which, on the “Baby Plan”, is shared with a bunch of other domains, some of which you may not wish to be associated.  The Business Plan gives you your own private IP address.

The SSL Certificate is useful if you want to have a store or keep secure information for your athletes.

Linux Server – Hostgator offers both Linux and Windows; make sure to get Linux.

Currently, the “Baby Plan” is about $8/mo and the Business Plan is $12/mo.  Visit HostGator’s hosting page to sign up.

If you need help setting up hosting for your website, please contact me.

Managed VPS Hosting

If you have a “Elite-Fitness” box that has plenty of revenue and you want a blazing fast site then I recommend using a managed hosting service.

“VPS” means Virtual Private Server, which means your site will run on its own little dedicated space in the cloud.  If you use our managed hosting, your site will run on top of a bullet-proof Linux distro running the super-fast Nginx webserver.

“Managed” means that somebody will personally set up your server for speed with caching of your database and media.  They’ll also do scheduled backups and restore your website if it gets hacked or if one of your administrators accidentally ruins it.

Managed VPS Hosting is extremely fast, reliable, and personal.  If you are really rich, you might look into FireHost, which is one of the best (but starts at $200/mo), or, if you’re only sort of rich, you can use Site Gone Bad’s Managed VPS Hosting, which starts at just $50 / month.  Contact me for more info.