Web Hosting Services – A Total Beginner’s Guide to Website Hosting
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting (in simple terminology) is the process of storing space for websites or an application online after your website has been accessible on the Internet and is accessed by any computer that is connected to the Internet.
Web hosts are businesses that lease their technologies and services to host websites online. When the hosting company hosts your website, the users can connect to it by typing your website’s URL (domain name) within their web browser. When they type in this information, their computer is connected to your site’s server. The server provides (sends the files you’ve stored on the storage to display) your website to the visitors’ web browser.
There are a variety of web hosting options to choose from. To figure out which one would best suit your needs, consider the following questions:
What type of website will you be hosting online? Blogs or an e-commerce site or a news site and so on? It will determine the amount of web traffic you can expect to receive and how strong the infrastructure needed to host your site should be.
- What are the main goals of your site? What speed do you anticipate seeing yourself growing your online business?
- How much assistance will you require?
Your answers will help determine the amount you’ll need to meet the following requirements:
- Storage space
- Bandwidth
- Control is it crucial to have root access to your server?
- Cost-what are you willing or required to spend?
Examine their claims or performance in the following areas:
- Do they ensure at least 100% uptime? Where are their servers?
- Experience in the business is one method to judge their credibility.
- Customers: How many customers do they have? Where do they have a presence?
- Reviews and online reviews- These will give you a more accurate idea of the company’s credibility.
- Support – Does the company provide 24/7 assistance with trained staff to help you?
- Related products: Select a web hosting provider that provides other web service-related services like email, security or backup service. In one place can reduce the time needed to coordinate with multiple service providers.
- Security concerns
- Backup services
Mobile Access: Can you access your control panel on your mobile device?
Shared Hosting:
If you run an online blog or business just beginning with Shared Hosting, it’s the best option, to begin with. It’s the least expensive hosting solution available since the servers are shared with other websites. It’s simple and user-friendly. However, since you share resources and space with websites on the same server, any overload from another site can cause your site to become slow. There is no control you have over the server.
WordPress Hosting:
If you own a WordPress website or blog, It is highly recommended to buy a WordPress hosting plan since it is designed for your WordPress website.
Reseller Hosting:
If you’re interested in getting into hosting, buying Reseller Hosting allows you to lease or re-sell the hosting services offered by the hosting company that is the parent. Through Reseller Hosting, it is possible also to sell all other web services provided by the host parent.
Dedicated Hosting:
Dedicated hosting gives you complete/administrative control of your server with full root access. You are free to install any program you like.
VPS hosting:
You could imagine VPS hosting as a superior level, more powerful and advanced version of hosting shared. Although you share your website with another, you’re given resources that aren’t shared with other websites. If you are unable to afford an individual server, VPS can be the right way to choose.
The Benefits of Web Hosting Services
The right kind of web hosting plans can offer your site a lot. Without the proper web host, you run the risk of having a site that loads slowly (or not all), ruins your chances of ranking, and a lot more. However, choosing a high-quality host can help you avoid the tragic fate above.
There are many reasons why web hosting is important; it’s a service that is high-quality, reliable, and professional . Here’s a list of the largest benefits a rock-solid hosting provider can provide for your website.
1. Improved Site Performance
When it comes to succeeding online your site’s performance matters a lot. In fact, you only have a few seconds to capture your visitor’s attention before they leave your site and never return again. If your site takes forever to load, then your visitors aren’t going to stick around.
Not only that, but your site’s performance also affects your search engine rankings. With slow loading speeds your site will measure poorly in user experience metrics, which can influence how high your site ranks in search.
With a high-quality web host, loading speeds won’t be an issue for you. Now, you could have a very high performing host and your site could be optimized poorly, but once you fix your website’s slow loading times, you should find your site loads incredibly fast.
2. Outstanding Technical Support
If you’re providing products or services through your website, then you realize the importance of timely and helpful customer support. Your hosting company should be no different.
Imagine you’re in the middle of a big launch; everything is going fine until your site mysteriously goes offline. What do you do now? Every moment you’re offline is costing you sales. Hopefully, you can turn to your hosting provider’s support staff and they’ll be able to bring your site back online as quickly as possible.
If you don’t have the technical skills yourself, then your hosting provider will be like the technical team member you never had.
3. Domain-Associated Email Address
If you want to look professional, then you’re going to need a branded email address that uses your domain name. For example, if your domain is “newdomain.com”, then you’ll want an email address that says “mark@newdomain.com”.
If you’re reaching out to customers and clients via email, the last thing you want is to use your regular Gmail address.
When you use a quality host service provider you’ll have the ability to create your own domain-specific email address. Some hosts limit you to one, while others will allow you to create an unlimited number of domain-specific email addresses.
This allows you to look professional when reaching out to people via your website. Most hosts also have a number of email management tools built-in as well. For instance, you’ll be able to check, send, and receive emails, as well as set up email forwarders, so you can manage your emails from your preferred email provider.
4. Improved Website Security
Website security is something that a lot of website owners never think about. Although having a 100% secure website is nearly impossible, you never really know where the next threat is going to come from. You can still take steps to ensure your website is as secure as possible.
The foundation of your website’s security begins with your host service provider. After all, this is where all of your site’s files are going to be stored. A quality host will have multiple levels of security in place.
For starters, you have the actual physical datacenter, which will be protected. Then you have any necessary firewall protection on the servers themselves. Finally, depending on what kind of web hosting services you have, you’ll have security measures in place that protect your site from other sites using the same server.
As you can see that’s a lot of steps to secure your site. Then, you have everything you can do on top of that to secure your own website. This will involve things like locking down your login screen, installing spam software, changing up user permissions, or even installing one of many security plugins to help enhance your existing security.
Hopefully, your host also has regular website backups in place. You might not ever need to use them, but if your site does get hacked, you can just restore to a previous version of your site, instead of having to start over from scratch. These can also come in handy if you accidentally take down your site by editing any of the core files. Instead of having to troubleshoot every little thing, you can just restore your site from a previously saved backup.
5. High Reliability and Uptime
When you’re trying to find the right hosting company, you’ve probably come across the term uptime. It’s actually incredibly important. Your site’s uptime is how often your site will actually be online. You’re probably thinking, “I want it online all the time,” and that’s a natural response.
However, most hosts have a clause in the hosting contract that specifies the percentage of time that your site will be online. For most hosting companies this number is 99.9%. That small percentage of time when your site is offline is when things like server repairs, updates, and maintenance are done.
If you’re choosing a host because of its high uptime, you’ll want to make sure this claim is valid. The online reviews that speak to downtime will say a lot, and so will their guarantee. Some hosts will even offer payment credits for any time that your site is offline outside of the guarantee.
Regardless, a hosting company with high uptime can be very beneficial to your bottom line. After all, people can’t buy your products or services when your site is offline.
As you can see, the right web host can bring a lot of benefits to your website. While the wrong host will only make your success online that much more difficult.
We hope that we’ve helped you understand what Web Hosting is and the way it operates.
We, 1onlyhost has been providing professionals in web hosting and related products for a long time. We invite you to give us a shot!
