Have you ever wondered how web hosting works? or what are skills needed to host a website? These are some questions that arise whenever we think about what website hosting is.
To build a website, you need to have the relevant skills and expertise. But what after building a website? You need a platform to host it. That is where website hosting comes into the picture.
Because hosting is very important for a website to go live. Without a hosting provider, you can’t publish your web online.
As the hosting helps in bridging the gap between a website and a platform to get live. It is crucial for every business owner or individual to learn the proper way of website hosting.
Website hosting is one of the primary steps that is taken by the owners or developers to get their website live on the internet.
In this blog, you will learn about, what is website hosting, what are its types, how does it work, and the difference between free and paid hosts.
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What is website hosting?
Website hosting is an online platform where you can publish your website for the internet. The website can be an application, e-commerce website, or business website.
Every website developer or owner needs to avail a web hosting service to make their website live. Web hosting services are like a virtual space that you are renting or purchasing for a specific time. The virtual space is utilized to host your website files and other related materials.
The virtual space is located on a computer server where you get a dedicated space for your website. This server works 24×7 by providing new seamless connectivity. The web site hosting companies are wholly and solely responsible for keeping your website continuously live without any breakdown. They are even liable for checking viruses, updating the latest software, managing content assets like images and documents.
Whenever you purchase a website hosting space, you will get the server details. In which you can create an account, and host your website within the allocated virtual space.
Before taking a website hosting service, you really need to be very careful in selecting a vendor. Because if you want your website to be always online, you always need to ensure that you take website hosting from a reliable company. A reliable company can be someone who has good reviews, maximum uptime and has a great support team. These things make a great website hosting company.
One of the popular web hosting companies is Liquid Web, Flywheel and InMotion Hosting.
What are the types of website hosting?
Every website hosting provider has a unique set of offerings and plans. Web hosting comes in different types of technology and features. The main motive is to create value for customers and achieve better results through the internet. All these providers have one thing in common that there are around four types of major website hosting plans.
Now let us understand what are the different types of website hosting.
1. Shared web hosting
This is one of the entry-level plans that is popularly sold by all the hosting providers. Because it is very easy to set up, cost-efficient and you get all the major features that are required to host a website. This makes shared hosting one of the best plans for a beginner who is going to host a website on the digital platform.
The shared website hosting is recommended for entry-level blogger or business owners who don’t have much incoming traffic. It is suitable for these segments because of its cost-efficiency factor and you can get your website immediately live.
If you are a business owner or a blogger who drives millions of users to your website, then the shared website hosting plan can’t sustain that traffic. Because to handle such a large-scale website, you need powerful capabilities so that your website doesn’t break down for other users.
If we are downplaying that fact, shared web hosting is the best plan for a beginner-level user.
2. Virtual private servers hosting (VPS)
They are also called virtual dedicated servers. VPS hosting is a powerful website hosting platform that has dedicated storage space and faster processing power. VPS plan is suited for customers who are hosting hundreds of websites on one server. The functionality is almost similar to web shared hosting, but this is more compelling than that.
If we have to talk about the key difference between shared web hosting and VPS hosting is that you get complete access to your virtual space. When you get full access to your dedicated website hosting, you can perform many other tasks that were limited to shared hosting. This gives you an opportunity to boost your potential and scale growth through this medium.
Virtual private servers are technological driven that need to be managed by people who have VPS expertise. Because this is something not as convenient as shared web hosting. VPS provides a platform to install its own operating system to host a website. This can be done only by people who have VPS management skills.
3. Dedicated website hosting
This is one of the common terms where every blogger or a business might have encountered while researching for a hosting plan. Because dedicated website hosting is popular. Due to its advanced futuristic capabilities that are offered for a website. This dedicated hosting plan helps a website to reach milestones that are not limited by traffic or its media capability.
Dedicated hosting is also called managed hosting. They are basically a server that is dedicated for one user on rent. This plan gives you the complete freedom to manage everything on your own. As you don’t need to worry about other people occupying your digital space as it happens in shared hosting. Literally, you get a complete physical server dedicated to you.
The downside of a dedicated plan is that it is quite expensive. Because of its advanced functionality, a dedicated website hosting plan needs people who have experience in managing servers. This plan is suitable for enterprise-level companies that have large data to be managed. And it is best for getting a complete security plan as the system is completely managed by one user.
4. Cloud hosting
This is a popular concept that has been evolved in terms of web hosting plans. Cloud hosting server interlinks between multiple website servers. This mode of operation ensures that whenever there is any requirement for additional features or power to deliver a set function, cloud hosting immediately takes the help of other servers.
Example: Website A is getting millions of traffic which are not usual. Cloud hosting connects with other servers to facilitate better performance for the website.
Cloud hosting is getting popular day by day, because of its seamless connectivity for a website to be 24×7 live. Whenever the website requires any additional support to deliver better results for the website, it takes help from other servers. This ensures that the website will keep on running evenly without any hassle.
Another best part of cloud hosting is that they are unmetered, powerful, dependable, and provide unlimited disk space. You can easily host tons of media files and other content resources on your website without any lag in performance. This makes cloud hosting plans ideally recommended from entry-level to large-scale businesses based on the budget.
How does website hosting work?
Let me try to brief the functionality in simple terms so that it is easily understandable for everyone.
When you purchase a domain, the next step for you would be taking a web hosting service. To purchase a web hosting service, there are multiple shared hosting options. To name a few: shared hosting, dedicated servers, and VPS. When you select the desired hosting plan for a website based on your requirement, now it’s time to get your website live.
Every hosting provider introduces a separate plan based on the bandwidth, storage capacity, and processing speed. Through these functionality options, it influences a consumer to improve their decision-making process.
After purchasing the hosting plan, now it’s time for you to connect the domain to the hosting provider. You can basically do it by inserting the name server details that are given by the hosting provider or you can do it through the DNS propagation.
When you successfully bridge the gap between the domain and hosting provider, now it’s time to launch your website. The website can be of any sort, like a CMS, HTML code files or it can even be other platforms. You need to host the website files and link the database file. This step will help to connect your domain name and your website.
When you upload all the website files to the server, the details are propagated with the domain name as well as your system. Now whenever you search from any browser by typing your website address, your website will start reflecting on the front end.
This is the basic functionality working overview of a web hosting process.
Related: What is Cpanel?
Free website hosting Vs Paid website hosting
While there are a lot of benefits to opting for a paid hosting plan, free web hosting has a limited set of functionality. Let’s understand each of its attributes in detail.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth in web hosting has multiple definitions. It ranges from the web hosting speed to the disk space allocated for your website.
When it comes to the paid web hosting plan, there are plans which have unlimited disk capacity. And you also get better page speed performance through optimised RAM. The higher the disk capacity is the higher the media files that you can host on your website.
When we compare the same thing to free the posting plan, you don’t get any such features. The disk capacity is limited which makes the website underperform or repel your online readers when there are no visual creatives.
Emails
In free web hosting plans, you can’t get a dedicated custom email of your domain. While in paid web hosting, you can easily get a custom email for your website.
Business email helps in building trust and credibility with your customers. This is best suited for small scale to large scale companies. Because whenever customers see that you are using a non-business email ID, the trust gradually decreases.
Traffic
Usually, in a free web hosting plan, there is a metered amount of traffic that you can generate. This is one of the major drawbacks of taking a free plan when you want to scale your website or blog.
Whereas in the paid web hosting plan, there is no limit to generating traffic from search engines. You can get better results and higher returns for the efforts that you have demonstrated to your website.
Customization
The free plan does not provide any customization for your website files. If you have to change any appearance or add any extra features to the website, this is not possible.
In the paid web hosting plan, you will get tons of customization features that are very easy to change and integrated in minutes. This helps you to drive better results whenever you want to optimize the performance of your website.
Support
The free web hosting plan does not provide any customer support which makes it our major drawback. As customer support is important for whenever your website goes down, you can easily reach out to them and get it live.
Paid web hosting plan provides customer service, you can easily reach out through telephone, website chatbot, and even emails. They will respond to you as soon as possible and provide your solutions whenever you encounter problems.
If you see the above comparison data, a free web hosting plan is ideal for people who just want to experiment with their website or a blog. It even suits people who have limited traffic and there are no high expectations of scaling growth. But when it comes to the paid web hosting plan. There are a lot of benefits and opportunities that create for you to scale growth on the internet. This is best suited for people who want to do internet business and gain revenue.
Related: Why Web Hosting is Important?
Conclusion
Website hosting is all about hosting a website on a server. It is a digital platform that lets you showcase your website or a blog to the world.
Since you have understood the concept of website hosting, you need to choose the right platform. Because when you select whether you want to opt for a paid or a free platform, they have their own benefits. You need to weigh down the options and see which would be the ideal platform for you.
If you are opting for a paid website hosting platform, you can easily find many options. As plenty of web hosting providers are giving irresistible deals to consumers. It ranges from free business email, unlimited hard disk capacity, better bandwidth, and so on. Depending upon your requirements, you can proceed ahead in purchasing the web hosting service.
Over to you.
Which platform would you choose and why?
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