Beginners Guide What Is A Web Hosting
Beginners Guide: What Is A Web Hosting?
If this is the first time that you are hosting your own website, there must a 1001 questions that are running in your head about this. Worry not, we are here to give you the basic of web hosting and it will help you clear some of those doubts in your head.
TO start, a web host is actually a supercomputer that hosts websites. That is basically it. Don’t overcomplicate things and don’t overthink. It is what it is.
You might be asking yourself: “Can I host my own website? I have a computer at home as well!”
Unless you have a supercomputer at home, we would suggest against that idea! There are many reasons web hosts exist and their low cost and high performance make them affordable for everyone, not to mention headache-free. Trust us when we say you don’t really want to go through the pain just of having a website that crashes every 2 days.
When it comes to hosting, there are three different type of hosting in the market, namely Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and VPS Hosting. We will dissect each one for you:
- Shared Hosting
Lets start with shared hosting. This type of hosting by far the most common option for small businesses, individuals, and even some popular websites which doesn’t require a huge amount of visitors. Shared hosting simply hosts multiple website on a single server. The advantage to using shared hosting is it makes it extremely cheap because other websites are sharing the same costing with you. Like we said, it’s suitable for those who are looking for something that won’t hurt their pocket.
- Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting on the other hand consists of a single server that hosts one single website. The perk to having a dedicated server is that the entire computer is focused on giving your website the best possible performance. While it can be pretty expensive, it is worth the cost if your website demands very fast page-load times, a dedicated IP, and the means to handle a lot of traffic, like upwards of 100,000 visitorsper month. Usually, you would go for dedicated hosting when you traffic starts to grow exponentially. Large companies would also go for dedicated hosting to make sure that their web visitors gets the best experience while visiting.
- VPS Hosting / Cloud Hosting
VPS basically stands for “Virtual Private Server.” A VPS has a huge amount of computing resources that you can purchase a portion of for a price. You don’t have to purchase everything, you just purchase what you need, including bandwith, storage space, emails etc. Imagine a huge house with a lot of facility but you only pay for what you need.
The best part about VPS is flexibility. You do not need to change server if you plan to scale. Imagine if traffic suddenly floods in because some of your article went viral on that day. Instead of crashing your website, VPS will automatically adjust the bandwith on that day and will enable a larger amount of user to move into your website Also, with a VPS you have a huge number of options as far as software and hardware go, and you usually pay by the hour instead of having a monthly fee.
VPS hosting is good for the more technically inclined and usually caters to programmers and web designers.
When considering which one to buy, always choose based on your estimated traffic that will be coming in. Also, when choosing web hosting, make sure that you choose one that has 24/7/365 customer support. It could give you a lot of headache when you run into trouble and customer support is one that will be assisting you all the way.