What is a web server and why does it matter for your legal business website?
Servers, hosting, uptime, downtime. Every website depends on all of it, and yet most legal business owners are asked to make decisions about it without ever having it explained properly. Here is the plain English version.
The simplest explanation
A web server is a computer. Its job is to store your website and send copies of it to anyone who asks. When a visitor types your address into their browser, their browser asks the server 'please send me the homepage', and the server responds with the files.
Hosting means paying for space on one of those computers. You could technically buy your own server and put it in your office, but almost nobody does that any more. You pay a hosting provider a monthly fee and they handle the hardware.
Shared vs dedicated hosting
Shared hosting means your site sits on a server alongside many other sites. It is cheap. It is fine for most legal businesses that get modest traffic. The downside is that if a neighbour on the same server has a bad day, your site can slow down too.
Dedicated (or 'managed') hosting means your site has its own resources. It is more expensive but faster and more reliable. Most legal businesses do not need dedicated hosting until they hit significant traffic volumes.
What uptime means and why 99.9% matters
Uptime is the percentage of time your site is actually available. 99.9% sounds like a lot but it still means about 45 minutes of downtime a month. 99% would be over 7 hours. 99.99% is closer to 5 minutes.
For a legal business website, 99.9% is a reasonable minimum. Anything worse and you should be shopping around. Anything much better is a nice-to-have that usually costs more than it is worth.
What happens when a server goes down
Visitors see an error message instead of your site. Search engines that try to crawl during that time make a note. Prospective clients close the tab and try someone else. Short outages happen to everyone. Repeated or long outages are a serious commercial problem and mean it is time to switch host.
How Legal Growth approaches hosting
Every website we build or manage is hosted on infrastructure we have vetted for uptime, speed and support. We handle the technical relationship with the host so you never have to. If we take on an existing website that is hosted somewhere unreliable, we will tell you and give you honest options for moving.
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