Amazon Web Services
When it comes to hosting websites, the undisputed industry leader is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Reasons why Airtight prefers AWS
There are good reasons why AWS has about 33% market share of all cloud computing services worldwide.
Here are just a few reasons why our DevOps team prefers AWS:
- Security: AWS uses world-class security practices to harden its infrastructure via physical, operational, and software measures. AWS has independent security audits conducted on its infrastructure. Furthermore, they give Airtight the framework for hardening our own infrastructure, by limiting access to resources in whatever way we feel necessary.
- Stability: AWS operates 16 data centers in the US and has an excellent reputation for providing stable hosting. Airtight uses AWS services such as auto-scale groups to ensure your website or web application is always available.
- Wide range of services: AirTight can take advantage of AWS’s EC2 cloud computing servers, S3 storage, content distribution networks, RDS database servers and other services to give our clients exactly what they need to run their web applications flawlessly.
- Affordability: AWS is surprisingly affordable. Clients pay only for the compute power, storage, and bandwidth used. You don’t have to sign a long-term contract, but you can save on some services when you commit to one year of hosting.
- Client Control: Our clients can enter their credit card information in AWS to pay for the services they need. We’ll have enough control over the account to do our jobs using AWS Assume-Role functionality (no shared passwords), but we cannot see your payment information and you can completely remove our access if you ever need to.
Dangers of Cheap Hosting
If your technology needs are simple, your hosting may not cost much more on AWS than it would on a cheap shared host. Certainly there are AWS customers who pay thousands or even hundreds of thousands in hosting fees, but some customers may only pay $30-50 per month for best-in-class hosting. Here’s why you should think twice before trusting your web application to a cheap host.
Security problems: If one of the other sites on your shared server is attacked or breached, that could cause your site to experience the same problem. A DDOS attack on one site, means all the sites on the server may fail. Malware injected into one site could spread to all other sites on the same server.
Single Point of Failure: A shared host puts as many websites on a server as they can. This means that if one site causes trouble on the server, all sites could crash. Shared host = shared downtime.
Site speed: Airtight will build your site using optimized code, a CDN for images, and all the best practices necessary for top performance, but if your host has limited resources, the site will still be slow.
Customer Dis-service: AWS gives Airtight the tools to solve most problems ourselves, with no need to contact the company. But when there’s an issue with your shared hosting, we typically have to spend time on hold with inexperienced engineers (sometimes off-shore) who struggle to fix the issue. This costs us time and costs our clients money.
Web Design Technologies
These are some of the web design and development tools and techniques we like to use:
Adobe Creative Cloud
The industry standard software suite for designing websites and web applications. This is our primary tool for creating interactive mockups.
HTML CSS JS
Well-written HTML and CSS are vital for a good user experience. JavaScript makes it come alive. These are the fundamentals of any good website tech stack. We insist on writing clean, efficient HTML, CSS and JavaScript because it will benefit the client for as long as the site exists.
PHP
No other server-side language is as popular as PHP. With vast open source resources and a huge community, it’s a logical choice for most sites.
WordPress
There’s a reason that more than 40% of all websites use WordPress. It’s an easy way to have a ton of functionality and an intuitive CMS. What started as a basic blog platform has become an extremely flexible and powerful platform for building complex websites and web applications.
React
Airtight uses ReactJS to build website interfaces with dynamic content. React JS is a JavaScript library originally developed by Facebook and used to build interactive elements on websites. It is open source software, meaning that we can use it without licensing fees for our client.
Laravel
Laravel is a newer, but well-established PHP framework with all the building blocks to develop a complex web application quickly and affordably.
Vue
Airtight uses Vue.js (also known as Vue) to build website interfaces with dynamic content. Vue is a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to rapidly build a single-page application or a complex web application. Vue is open source software, meaning that we can use it without licensing fees for our client.
Amazon Web Services
When it comes to hosting websites, the undisputed industry leader is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Why Hire Airtight Design?
Type “Atlanta web design” into a search engine like Google and you’ll get 842,000 results. Feeling overwhelmed with the choices? Let us give you seven reasons more to choose Airtight Design.
The Process
Here is what to expect if you hire Airtight Design to build or redesign your website.