What is a Website Hosting?

After you have registered your domain name, the next thing to do would be deciding a website hosting plan that suits your needs.

As I resembled domain name registration to registering your business name in the brick and mortar world, you can imagine website hosting as your office space. As you need to rent a office for you putting your people, computers, furniture, office system and facilities in; similarly you need a website hosting space that stores your files, pictures, emails, and so on.

The reason being, whatever content, document or pictures you view or downloaded from a website must be stored somewhere, and made accessible to visitors 24 hours a day, together with other security features to protect your database from hackers and spammers. So to say, the files must be stored not in your own computers, but rather, in server space of your website hosting provider.

Types of Website Hosting

There are several types of website hosting available, the common types are free hosting, shared hosting, virtual private server, and dedicated hosting. The types of hosting you choose largely depending on your purpose, needs, budget, skill level, and time available.

The purpose and needs of you having the website fall back on whether it is a personal website for you making personal announcement, connected with friends; business website for you publishing products information, online PR and branding and serves as an interactive platform keeping your customers; or an eCommerce store that requires online transactions, higher security needs, and for you conducting most of your business activities through Internet. Finally, your budget and time available also play a part for you deciding which hosting package to go for.

1. Free Hosting

If you intend running your personal website or wish to try out something without serious intentions of making it real business in the future, you may consider free hosting as an option. Somehow, you may not want to do so after putting much effort and time into building your website, only sad to find out about the potential setbacks that probably make you shun away from free hosting, if given a choice again.

Theses are the few major considerations before choosing a free hosting:

• Free hosting generally comes with pop-up advertisement, banner ads, or any other mean of forced advertising on your webpage. This is necessary in return for free hosting providers covering the cost of their server space and services.
• You may also find ad-free hosting without a charge. This is not necessary a good news if you intend to keep your website for long, as they may cease services in view of insufficient income-generating avenues.
• Normally the free hosting providers impose strict restrictions including small memory size, data transfer a month (i.e. traffic), limited image types, and so on.
• Bandwidth or speed of access for your website can be a critical factor especially if you publish pictures or other media files for view or download. Your visitor may not come visit your website again if the access speed or downloading process takes too long to complete.
• Reliability of hosting service is crucial as you may not visit a website again if the website access is frequently down.

Finally, you may want to consider if you are allowed to expand your website in the future and keep all you works!

2. Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most common type of website hosting plan used for most websites, and it is an economical way of creating your own website. In this scenario, the hosting service provider owns a server before leasing the server space out to several clients that share the server capacity and resources together. Therefore, in this shared hosting environment, you will need to share the same enterprise-level machine with handful of other website owners. In other words, your website will share the same server while being subject to certain limitations such as memory space, monthly data transfer, allowed domain name, allowed email accounts, and so on with other website stored within the same server. One setback you may want to take note of is that, should you share the same server with another spammer or adult site, likely your website will be affected or emails risk being blocked due to their activities. My suggestion is going for only the large and established web hosting service providers, as they will always have policy in place to prevent this from happening.

The greatest advantage is the enhanced capacity as compared with free hosting, while enjoying many other benefits without paying much for the hosting service. Although there are limitation imposed, but the capacity allotment is generally sufficient for most business and commercial use.

3. Dedicated Hosting

Hosting your website in a dedicated hosting will entitle you to all the benefits you may enjoy making use of the server capacity and resources for your website. You can avoid limitations and setbacks in hosting your website in a shared environment, but of course, it costs a price. Dedicated hosting is particularly important if you are running a huge eCommerce business with lots of bandwidth and memory required, and enhanced security level (SSL) is crucial especially for online transaction. In certain instances, large ecommerce website may take up several dedicated server for them running their business effectively considering the capacity, memory, number of visitors, and so on.

4. Virtual Private Server

If you find hosting your website in dedicated hosting environment proven too costly, virtual private server can be a good choice, as you may enjoy the benefits of a dedicated server while paying a price way below. It runs similarly to shared hosting, but the difference is - you share the resources with only a limited number of other website owners, instead of a handful of them.

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