Types of Web Hosting
If you’re a small business owner, you’ll likely start with shared hosting or WordPress hosting because of its affordability and ease of use.
With shared hosting, the resources of a single web server, such as bandwidth and data storage, are divided among multiple websites. This limits the amount of content you can store on your site, such as blog posts and landing pages, and the number of monthly visitors your site can handle, but it makes shared hosting affordable. Low-cost shared hosting plans can usually accommodate up to 10,000 monthly visitors, while higher-end plans can usually accommodate up to 400,000 monthly visitors.
WordPress hosting is hosting (usually shared) optimized for WordPress, a content management system (CMS) for creating and organizing blog posts and other site content. It includes pre-installed WordPress and may also include pre-installed themes and plugins, and automatic WordPress updates. Low-cost WordPress hosting plans can often accommodate up to 10,000 monthly visitors, while higher-priced plans can typically accommodate up to 400,000 visitors.
Cloud hosting stores your website in multiple data centers to improve uptime and load speeds for users around the world. This type of hosting is used by popular website builders such as Squarespace. Traditional website hosting companies also offer cloud hosting. Cloud hosting bandwidth varies greatly, but most plans can accommodate at least 10,000 monthly visitors, and cloud hosting makes it very easy to scale up as your site grows.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting involves creating multiple virtual servers within one physical server. Each virtual server has its own dedicated resources, such as storage and bandwidth. This typically allows you to store more data (tens or hundreds of thousands of large files, such as images and videos) and serve more traffic (often hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors) than shared hosting. You can also customize aspects of the server, such as the operating system.
Dedicated hosting provides a full physical server to a single customer. Many dedicated hosting plans can store over 1TB of data and accommodate millions of monthly visitors. However, these plans can be expensive and complicated to set up, so dedicated hosting is generally not recommended for small businesses.
performance
There are two ways that a web host affects your site’s performance: uptime and site speed.
Uptime is the amount of time your website is online. Most web hosting services offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means that server issues will not take your site down for more than 45 minutes per month. Some even offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which means that server issues will not take your site down for more than 4 minutes per month.
Site speed is the time it takes for a website to load. Generally speaking, the faster the load time, the better. Web hosts offer several ways to improve this aspect of performance.
International data centers allow you to choose servers closer to your target users for improved loading speeds, caching tools allow you to store important data on users’ browsers to speed up loading times on repeat visits, and content delivery networks (CDNs) allow you to store data in multiple locations around the world and ensure users’ browsers retrieve it from the closest server.
safety
Keeping your data and your customers’ data secure is important, especially if you accept payments or collect sensitive personal information through your website. Your web hosting plan should provide you with at least two security tools:
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate: A protocol that encrypts data sent to and from a website. An SSL certificate tells Google, browsers, and VPNs that your site is secure — some browsers and VPNs won’t even open your site without it. Firewall: A software tool that filters malware that tries to get onto your site. Some firewalls also provide protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) and brute force attacks.
Some hosts also offer security measures like malware scanning/repair to deal with any malware that has made it onto your site, and automated backups to ensure you can quickly restore your site if something goes wrong.
Customer Service
Customer service should be reachable at any time of the day or night via live chat, support ticket/email, or phone. Customer support representatives should be able to respond quickly to inquiries and be knowledgeable enough to resolve issues in a timely manner.
This is an area where checking reviews is important. Companies will always claim to have great customer service but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Check out sources like Trustpilot or our web hosting reviews to see what real customers’ experiences were like.
price
When considering the cost of web hosting, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Contract length: To get the cheapest price, you may need to purchase a one-, two-, or three-year plan and pay for all the months up front. Renewal price: Many web hosts offer a low introductory price and then increase the price significantly when it comes time to renew. Additional fees: You may have to pay extra fees, such as for a domain name. You should also be aware of transaction fees if you choose an e-commerce plan through a website-builder-focused host like Squarespace or Shopify.
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