Web hosting in Morocco

In Morocco, the first professional hosting offers date back to the early 2000s.

The market for Internet service providers was then very fragmented and the packs provided (including hosting) were not always as specialized and professional as desired.

Hosting was often outsourced to companies based abroad, with servers and expertise. The concentration of the market, the emergence of more and more specialized and efficient companies, as well as the growing and specific needs of Moroccan companies have led to the development of a local offer of more or less specialized solutions, which has spread little to small on more advanced techniques today that cover the vast majority of customer needs.

Web hosting is based on two broad categories of offerings: shared hosting solutions and dedicated hosting solutions, and today a little timidly towards cloud computing.

Shared hosting

The first hosting offer, allows to host on the same platform several websites. This type of hosting, the most popular, makes it possible to host a site at a lower cost because the resources (processor, memory, hard disk space) of the server are shared by the applications or websites of several clients. The main disadvantage is that of security, which is never optimal, although with the security tools today many web hosts are able to considerably reduce the level of this risk. Otherwise. Because of the sharing of server resources across multiple applications, this solution is not recommended for a website that requires significant resources.

Shared hosting is characterized first and foremost by packaging (all-inclusive formula) designed by hosting companies according to a certain number of criteria.

The offers are generally available in Linux or Windows hosting, which are the two major hosting server platforms for the general public. A few years ago, several companies offered web hosting packages for Java applications and websites. Today this tends to disappear Java is used for heavy applications generally synonymous with large processing capacity which is not indicated for shared hosting.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting is a solution where the client has all the resources of a server, which are dedicated to its sole use. It can consist of one or more physical or virtual servers. This exclusivity represents a substantial cost and it is generally chosen by companies or structures wishing to have a high level of security, all the resources of a server and especially also of customized solutions that are not available on shared hosting.

These two categories of hosting are almost offered by all companies offering hosting solutions in Morocco. The offers of each other differ according to the services, the storage capacities and other technical characteristics proposed.

Linux Hosting Vs Windows Hosting

A few years ago the battle was fierce between Windows and Linux for the leadership of web hosting, although Linux has always been ahead of Windows in this regard. Today, this battle was won hands down by linux, which concentrates the vast majority of websites published on the Internet thanks to the popularization of CMS (Content Management Systems) which are widely available under Linux and better. supported only under Windows.

As a result, several hosting companies now only offer packages under Linux in the pooled system because the demand for Windows hosting is no longer important enough to offer attractive offers at lower costs.

Traps to avoid

• Before developing your website, go around the hosts to see the technologies available on the market (some technologies are more expensive than others to host and are not necessarily better) failing to end up with a very expensive site to host. Indeed today the majority of hosts offer cheap packages for LAMP technologies (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) unlike websites developed with Microsoft technologies such as ASP.net which generally requires dedicated hosting or even more expensive Java sites
• Before subscribing to a hosting, check with the provider who developed the website that the versions of the host’s applications will work with your site and ensure that your site runs with the latest version of the applications.
• Make sure your domain name belongs to you by registering it directly with a registrar like Gozil https://gozil.ma
• Make sure you have technical support over the phone
• Be wary of offers or everything is unlimited (disk space, traffic, database)
• If your business uses mail a lot, do not opt for hosting solutions that include unlimited mailboxes. Opt for a separate messaging hosting offer.

What are the points to consider when choosing your web host?

• Quality of technical support (availability, telephone, email),
• Characteristics of the hosting package (technology used, the capacity of disk space, authorized traffic, type and number of database, means of administration of your hosting space …),
• Availability of servers (Will my website be visible 24 hours a day?),
• References of the host (usually a pledge of seriousness),
• Proposed rate.