At this time, it’s so easy to get a professional quality, eye-catching web page design for your business. There are many situations in which you might decide that self-hosting your website is the way to go. But most of the businesses out there don’t have enough time to give in making their own business website that has a very high quality. Building a website by yourself takes a lot of time and experience.
Unfortunately, time is not on our side. So unlike most people, I don’t want to code everything from scratch when I start a new website for my start-up. Why? You can always make more money, but you cannot buy more time.
Should I Choose a Website Builder Services or Self-Hosted Web Platform?
The difference comes when you have specific requirements of what you think is your ideal platform. To answer this question, please have a look on The Advantages and Disadvantages of Hosted Services or Self-Hosted Web Platform.
Self-hosting
- Very flexibility: You can install whatever you want. A website, a proxy, a VPN, hosted media files for streaming, e-mail newsletter tools … better customizability and you own your website and all its data. If you have acquired all the skills you need to build a website then you can make it exactly the way you want, and change the look of it whenever you want without any additional cost.
- It’s time-consuming and high-risk: you could react to system failure in minutes. Your server is running in the lack of support beyond documentation and forums.
- Save your money if you have good technical knowledge skills to set up and running multi websites, applications, tools… owned a server will save a lot of money. But in my experiences, the maintenance costs can also be higher with a self-hosted website, as you will be responsible for keeping on top of software updates and security patches yourself.
Hosted services
- Lower risk: With a hosted solution you never have to worry about updates. Most web hosting services will guarantee a secure service by running security audits, automatic updates, spam filtering, virus scans, and firewall configurations.
- There are lower initial start-up costs. Especially with popular website builders like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, … The costs for hiring in-house employees per year is far more than the cost of paying a hosting service. Using a web builder services will minimize errors and keeps things running smoothly.
- Save your time: Website builders come along with all the necessary tools that save time as well as money on designing a website. Most of them have drag and drop facility, thousands of templates to choose from i.e. The user does not have to write new code every time he wishes to make changes to the website.
Choosing between the hosted and self-hosted solutions can be tricky. From the start, you just need a well-designed website with basic features to introduce yourself to the world.
But most of the businesses out there don’t have enough time to give in making their own business website that has a very high quality. Building a website takes a lot of time and experience. Luckily, there are plenty of options available to skip the massive ‘code a web platform’ task list and get you to publish your content sooner. That’s why I would definitely recommend the website builders first then switch to self-hosted late.
I have been using several website builder services for my clients and I found that Wix has always been one of the easiest website builders. They had Wix ADI – an intelligent tool that automatically builds a stunning site for you using the information it found on the internet, making creating your perfect site a breeze! With Wix ADI builds a website process has become even more convenient.
The first time you use Wix Artificial Design Intelligence, you need to answer five questions:
- What will the website be used for?
- Do you need any special features or capabilities? (an online store, appointment booking capability or a blog.)
- What is the name of your business?
- Where is the business located?
- What design style do you want?
Once the user answers the questions, Wix ADI locates relevant content from around the web and social media channels that users can choose to add to their custom design. So your website is unique and has multiple sections, pages, layouts, themes… it’s solved the downsides of almost website builder services: many websites have similar layouts, color sets, fonts even their content.
But, if you don’t like what you see, everything is customizable and can be changed as you see fit. You can then make refinements and updates if you want to re-arrange your content, change the font style, add/remove content, select a different color scheme, etc.
Did you know? Wix has a basic free option for trying out the website builder. They give 100s of templates, unlimited pages & top grade hosting FREE
Try Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) for Free
The free version is good for testing out or for a casual site before purchase/switch to premium plans if you feel it’s good to start your professional website.
However, unlike others website builders, Wix does not let you edit the source codes of your website that includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript. If you want to turn your page a bit, you won’t be able to do this.
Can’t import my saved website to Wix ADI is another problem.
The Wix platform is clean, easy to navigate, and gives you all the features you need for customizing your site. As for me, Wix ADI looks more confidently. In my opinions, if you looking for a quality & professional website builder over the internet, it’s hard to beat Wix.
Have any experiences, good or bad, with self-hosting or website builder services? Let us know in the comments.