WEB HOSTING AND WHAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU
WEB HOSTING AND WHAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU
If you’re a business owner, you need a website. It’s easy to make a website. With so many self-service website builders, you can create a website in minutes. You don’t even need to know how to code. Unfortunately, an attractive website is nothing without web hosting. Without a web host, a website is static, inaccessible, and unprofitable. In this article, we go over the different types of web hosting services available to you and how to choose the right one for your business.
WHAT IS A WEB HOST?
When a person goes to your website, their browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.) asks the company hosting your website to display your site. The company that stores your website files is called a web host. The web host will display the website through the visitors browser. A web host makes a website accessible on the internet. A web host is a physical or cloud-based server where you upload, publish and store your website’s files. These files include your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, text, image, and video files. Website owners can own or rent space on a web host server. Except for home servers, web host servers are stored in data centers.
World-wide web hosting
To choose the web host that’s right for you, it’s important to analyze a few aspects about yourself and your business. To save you time and money, let’s examine a few factors before you commit to the first web host you find.
HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN DIFFERENT TYPES OF WEB HOSTING
When it comes to web hosts, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Choosing between the different types of web hosting services depends on your money, time, effort, and feature constraints. Consider the following situations before selecting between different types of web hosting:
What is your budget? The prices for renting a web host range from a few dollars to hundreds or thousands of dollars each month.
How much traffic do you expect on your website? Some web hosts have caps for resources like data, bandwidth, and memory. Your website’s performance will be affected by the amount of traffic your website experiences. Some hosts have pay-as-you-go packages—these are great for scalability. Others charge flat rates for unlimited resource usage.
What features are important? Does your business need a hosting service that offers 24/7 support? Does your website need scheduled data backups or high-level security?
How involved do you want to be? Assess your technical aptitude and determine how much you want to handle. Do you want to handle server configurations like the operating system, administrator settings, updates, and security? If so, do you want to be responsible to maintain updates? How about fixing these things when something goes wrong—like if your site crashes or gets hacked? With many web hosts, you can pay to have some or all your tasks managed.
What other tools do you need? Many hosting services offer robust features like account management, website builders, e-commerce platforms, content management software, and much more.
Most new entrepreneurs will start with the humble and inexpensive options and eventually upgrade to premium, full-featured hosts. We’ll review the most popular types, starting with beginner-friendly hosts, and work our way up.
Web hosting
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF WEB HOSTING SERVICES?
Once you determine your needs and limits, it’s time to choose your web host. There are several kinds of web hosts; each with their own benefits and tradeoffs. The different types of web hosting services are shared, virtual private server, dedicated web server, managed, cloud, colocated, reseller, and home web hosts. Continue reading to learn more about the different types of web hosting and which is best for you.
What is Shared Web Hosting?
A shared web host is perfect for new entrepreneurs, website owners with tight budgets, and sites with minimal traffic. Shared web hosts are super affordable because they house hundreds of other websites on a single server.
Because a shared web host leases many websites, the server does not have any configuration flexibility; all hosted websites have the same server configurations (e.g. operating system, users, networks, security, updates, etc). This rigidity makes them incredibly straightforward and easy to use.
Shared web hosts also come with resource limitations; a shared server divides its resources like RAM and CPU power among its tenants. This is often not a problem for new entrepreneurs because their sites do not need a lot of server resources. However, your website can suffer from slow page loads or crashes if your server is throttled by too many requests (e.g. Black Friday or DoS attacks). You can compare these vetted shared web hosts to get an idea of what services and tools are available at budget-friendly prices.
