What is it?
Web hosting is where you store all the files for the live website. It’s the physical location of your website.
There are several different price tiers for hosting, some from as little as $4 a month. These tiers all offer varying degrees of storage capacity, bandwidth, CPU usage and memory allowance. Some include SSL certificates; some you need to purchase SSL certificates separately.
Shared hosting VS VPS
There are two main types of website hosting, shared hosting, and Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Depending on your circumstances and what you want to achieve with your website will depend on which option is best for you.
Shared hosting
Hosting on a shared server means other websites are hosted on the same server and are using the same resources as you are such as CPU, disk space and memory, this can limit the performance of your website if you have high traffic volumes, although this is usually ok for most websites starting out. Your site speed and performance can be impacted by the amount of traffic someone else’s website on the same server is receiving though.
Shared hosting is the cheaper option when it comes to hosting and you can understand why when your websites performance can be impacted by others on the same server.
Should you choose shared hosting?
Shared hosting may be right for you if:
- You are building a blog or personal site
- You have a small budget
- You are not expecting much traffic to your site
- You want to make a small company website
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Virtual Private Server (VPS) means all the resources for that VPS are being utilised by only your website, this is best for high performing/high traffic websites. You will still be sharing the physical server itself, but all the websites on that server get assigned specific resources that can’t be impacted by other sites. This means those resources will always be available to you when you need them.
VPS is more expensive than share hosting but its worth it knowing that your site will always have the resources required to be able to perform at its best.
Should you choose VPS hosting?
VPS hosting may be right for you if:
- You have a larger budget
- You are expecting high amounts of traffic to the website
- You are running a medium to large business sized website
It’s also worth noting that you are able to upgrade or downgrade your hosting plans whenever you’d like, which means you can start off on a lower tier plan and increase your hosting resources as your business and website grow.
Cloud and Dedicated Hosting
There are also a few other hosting options such as cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. Cloud hosting is based on a network of servers and your files will be stored across multiple servers, meaning that if one server goes down, the others will still be able to serve your website. This also allows your website to be served from the closest server to the person accessing your website, allowing for faster load times.
Dedicated hosting is where your website is stored on a single physical server with no other websites being stored on it. This of course provides the best performance for your website but is also the most expensive.
I hope I’ve been able to provide you with some more insight in to web hosting and answer some of the questions you may have had or didn’t even know you had. As always, let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything else I can help you with.
