A web hosting provider, in the most straightforward sense, is a company that provides all services related to housing, serving, and maintaining files for websites. These services can differ depending on the web hosting type. Each of them has its own benefits and drawbacks. However, there are a few key elements that they all share.
Learning the different types of web hosting providers and their key characteristics can help you make the right decision when you are choosing a web hosting provider. That is why with this basic web hosting guide, we will explain what these elements are and what each of them means. But first, let’s take a look at the three main types of hosting:
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most popular, widely accessible, and reasonably priced web hosting type. Shared hosting implies sharing of resources among several users placed on one server. This hosting type is the simplest to set up and a great place to start if this is your first venture into the world of web hosting. It provides good quality features for very reasonable prices. It is a great starting point for growing businesses that want to expand.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting allows websites to completely rent and control their hosting server.
Dedicated hosting provides the most space, the best performance, and the highest level of security. This hosting alternative is highly priced and best suited for large websites with high traffic that require the best performance and can afford high monthly payments.
Virtual Private Servers Hosting
A virtual private server is a group of connected servers that work as a single resource. When you select virtual private server hosting, you are purchasing a portion of these servers that you can use to host your website. VPS is a combination of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. In many aspects, it is the middle ground between those two alternatives.
Web hosting elements :
Domain Name
A domain name is the name of your website. It has two essential parts the first part of the URL is your brand or business name and the second part is the domain extension, such as.com,.org,.net,.com.UK, etc.
Processing Strength
If you intend to use dedicated hosting or a VPS, processing power is a crucial consideration. The majority of web servers will give you access to a list that specifies how many cores of processing power are offered within each of their plans.
Storage
Storage is the amount of disk space that your website needs on the provider’s server. The website’s total size includes text, images, and multimedia files. Small to medium-sized websites need about 3-5 GB. If you want to calculate the total size of your website, you need to select the file and check the file properties.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data delivered from your server to the visitor’s browser. Bandwidth can be measured by the maximum data that can be transferred in a given time. Higher bandwidth means better performance.
In general, it’s a good idea to choose a plan that gives at least a little bit more bandwidth than you need in case those needs change.
Uptime
Uptime represents the amount of time that visitors can access your website online. Even though it may not be crucial for all websites to be accessible at all times, some websites experience income loss when they are down, making this a crucial consideration when choosing a web host. The industry standard uptime today is 99.59%, so anything below an uptime of 99.90% should not be acceptable.
Customer support Support should be higher on your list if you are new to web hosting and have no technical skills. Customer support will handle all website issues in a fast and efficient way and make sure your website functions correctly. It is crucial to pick a web hosting provider who has a good response time so that when difficulties that need to be fixed occur, the support team can step up and help.