What To Look For When Hiring A Website Design Company
April 21, 2022
What Is Web Hosting: The Ultimate Guide To Web Hosting
A question that we often get asked by people when we are creating their website is what is website hosting and why is it important when building a website? Website Hosting is one of the important aspects when it comes to websites as it’s service allows your site to run on the internet for people to visit.
Website hosting is often provided by web hosting companies or through a web design agency who can offer web hosting when creating your website. These web hosting companies allow businesses to run, do maintenance and run your website online.
When you want one of these web hosting sites to host your website, you will have to purchase a hosting plan. There are many different types of hosting plans you can purchase and how often you are billed depending on what suits your needs the best. These web hosting sites rent their service space, these service spaces store your sites data from everything to the HTML, CSS files, media content and many more.
Web hosting can seem like a lot of internet jargon when talking about it, we hope that creating this article that you get a better understanding how website hosting works.
To understand fully how web hosting works for your website. We will go over some of the most common types of web hosting that you will come across online plus a few features to look out for.
How Does Website Hosting Work?
As we previously stated before, website hosting is provided by web hosting companies that offer out computing services much like an apartment being rented out by a landlord. These web hosting businesses offer people a bunch of services, software and the connectivity which helps your website get online for everyone to see!
These amazing servers will store and make accessible to the whole world wide web. If your wondering ‘well why can’t I just use my computer that’s already connected to the internet to host my site?’ why it is possible for you to do this, the configuration process needed to do this can be very hard to accomplish by most users.
That’s why web hosting companies are often the most popular amongst business website and personal websites as it’s much easier and quicker instead of having an in-house server.
Domain Hosting
Your domain also has to be hosted somewhere, these web hosting companies will often host your domain name. These are domain name registrars, where they can register the address of your website for people to search and you will own it so no-one else can purchase it for themselves.
Hosting companies uses as DNS (Domain Name System) records that allows your domain to connect with your websites IP address (Internet Protocol) – this is a totally unique address to a physical server. You may have heard of IP addresses over time and know what they look like.
The reason IP addresses were created because it helps computers identify people online. It’d be really hard for us to memorise these IP addresses and type them so we can enter websites so DNS can help load these websites without no need to know the exact IP address.
Why Does Web Hosting Help My Website?
The best web hosting companies will be always maintaining their servers so it’s running 24/7 so your website never goes down. This is key to business owners who are running a website online that people are always able to visit your site.
Picking a website hosting provider can always be important to having a site that is quick, some web hosting providers will have slow loading speeds for their websites due to renting out too much space on their server. Make sure to do your research beforehand!
Web hosting aswell keeps your website secure by helping you get your SSL certificate if you reach out to support teams. Having a more secure website gives the user a more comfortable user experience when browsing your website.
You will also be able to access your websites control panel from hosting sites. Accessing your control panel you will be able to control certain aspects of your site, manage whatever domain names you have purchased and even upload files for your website.
Different Types Of Website Hosting
You may come across different types of hosting plans. Each hosting plan will be tailored depending on what your needs are. Such as what your website is built on, costs and knowledge.
These are some of the most common web hosting types you will see.
Cloud Hosting
This is a type of hosting that uses various website servers to bring max performance and speed-time on your site.
This hosting package offers amazing availability as it can distribute a range of virtual servers. Cloud hosting can handle a lot of traffic much better then different types of hosting packages.
You are completely safe aswell from any physical server issues. If one server happens to go down, another one will replace it instantly keeping your website up and running.
Shared Housing is a type of hosting where just one server hosts a range of websites. This service is popular amongst people who are on a shoe-strapped budget as it has to be the most cost effective hosting plus it’s pretty easy experience to use.
It’s hard to know exactly how many websites are currently being on this one server it can be from a few to a hundred. This could lead to a pretty unstable website hosting especially if there’s a surge of traffic on another site it could create a slower experience on your website.
VPS Hosting
A virtual private server hosting package hosts just a few websites on a single server but it provides the necessary resources for each of the users on the hosting package.
You can choose from two types of VPS Hosting which is managed or unmanaged. Being unmanaged means you will have to maintan the server yourself which can be very confusing if you’ve had no experience.
Managed hosting will be a higher cost then an unmanaged VPS hosting package but you will have the web host maintaining and keeping the server up and running with no problems.
Riley Williams is the creative force behind The Wolf Of The Web! With over 100+ websites built across diverse sectors. I believe in crafting eye-catching websites that not only look amazing but also generate more calls, leads, and sales for your business.
