A Beginner’s Guide to Website Hosting
Each website that lives online has its own host. Without it, websites cannot exist on the Internet. Sure, you can create a website for fun, but if you don’t host it, the only person that will be able to find it will be you.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of web hosting providers available on the market. You can find all kinds of good deals that allow you to host your website successfully and still be within your budget’s range. Also, there are many different hosting services that you can get. Namely, you can use shared hosting services, managed cloud servers, VPS servers, and more. Hosting your site on a managed cloud server is all the rage right now, and you can read more about it if you want to know why it’s so popular.
However, we need to explore the other hosting options as well if we want to have a full understanding of website hosting. So, let’s do that now!
What Is Website Hosting?
We’ll try to keep this part as short as we can. Hosting a website involves renting or buying a space that will house your website on the Internet. You can think of it as finding a house for your website, except it’s much cheaper and less complicated.
You can find web hosting for your site from companies, a.k.a providers, that offer web hosting services. Those providers have their own servers and the technical expertise and infrastructure to accommodate your website and keep it active on the Internet. The server where your site will be located will store all of its data, including content like photos, HTML, and CSS – the works. In short, no website can exist without a place to store its data, or in other words, web hosting.
How Does It Work?
As we mentioned, web hosting provides your website with a place to stay. And since your website is staying on a certain server, the server is responsible for keeping it active and providing your website visitors with content.
So, if someone opens your website, the server is responsible for sending your site’s content to them. As your visitors go through your site and click on different pages or links, the server will display all the content that the visitors are looking for on their screens. In shorter terms, the server is what allows other people to see your content and buy your products and read your blogs.
Types of Web Hosting Services
Now, let’s explore the different types of web hosting services that you can get for your website!
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the first tier of hosting services that you can get. It is the cheapest option and is usually the one that most people go with when they get their online business off the ground. Shared hosting is also the least powerful option and is suitable for small sites and blogs that don’t have many visitors and content.
If you want to write blogs, own a small or medium-sized company, or have a small tech startup, this hosting service is ideal for you. With this service, your website will live on a server along with multiple other sites and share resources with them. One downside to this type of hosting is that you will be affected by their sites and activities since you are sharing it with others. So, if one of the sites on your server experiences a sudden spike in traffic, you will experience lags or downtime on your site.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is a service that provides you with a lot more power and a dedicated space on the server just for you. It stands for Virtual Private Server and is excellent for businesses that want to grow online quickly.
With VPS hosting, even though you will share your server with other users, you will be completely isolated from them and will have your own dedicated virtual server. So, VPS hosting is more powerful and offers more privacy and resources compared to shared hosting. However, there are many other excellent features that you can get with this service, and you can read all about them here.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting. It is perfect for large enterprises that have their own information system and need to connect hundreds of employees. Also, managing this type of service is much more challenging and requires higher technical knowledge.
With this type of hosting, you will get direct access to your server and have complete control over it. You will be able to choose what goes on the server and what kind of software it uses. Also, you will have it all to yourself and will have complete privacy and security.
Since dedicated servers cost a lot of money and are some of the best you can get, you need to go about how you choose your dedicated server carefully. So, before picking which dedicated server you want to buy, there are some things that you need to consider, which you can read more about here.
Final Thoughts
Now that you need what web hosting is, how it works, and what types of web hosting you can get, you can begin your online journey prepared. Also, by knowing more about how this service works and all the different types you can get, you can choose which hosting best suits your needs!
