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You might think, What is Web Hosting and How Does it Work? Web hosting is what makes your website publish content or application on the Internet.
A web host gives you space on its service so that others can see your site online. When you sign up for a web hosting service, that means you rent some space on a physical server. Where you can store all the files and data necessary for your website to work properly.
In this article, I’m going to explain web hosting in greater detail. Before we go to any details, I want to start with the basics to make sure you have a full understanding of what is web hosting and how web hosting works.
So, let’s dive right in.
What is Web hosting?
A good way to think about if your domain name is the address of your house, then web hosting is the actual house that addresses points to.
So, “What actually is web hosting”?
Well, Web hosting is the process of buying or renting space for a website on the World Wide Web.
This house allows organizations and individuals to post website content such as HTML, CSS, and images. So the site has to be housed on a server to be viewable online.
Who provides web hosting? A web hosting service provider is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website visible on the web.
When Internet users want to look at your website, all they need to do is type your website address into their browser.
Their computer will then hook up with your server and your WebPages delivered to them through the browser. Most web hosting companies need their own domain name to host with them.
If you do not have a domain name, the web hosting companies will help you buy one.
In a nutshell, Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live. It’s just like the home of your website where it actually lives.
All websites need web hosting to serve the data people looking at on the internet.
How Does Web Hosting work?
Web hosts are companies that sell their services and technologies to host websites on the internet.
After registering your domain name, the following step is typically getting reliable web hosting. The great news is that web hosting doesn’t cost that much and averages around $15 to $30 a month, depending on your plan.
You then should link your name to a hosting company and so to a web builder. Once the hosting company hosts your website, users can access it by typing in your web address (domain name) in their browser.
Once they try this, their computer connects to the server your website is hosted on. The server successively serves the website to your web visitor in their application.
The way it works is that web hosting companies rent out a space on their disk drive and promise to deliver the performance indicated in their plans. Additionally, they also offer added features like added security and SSL certificates.
Among the many things that a web host provides, some of the more crucial ones include file transfer protocol (FTP). This feature allows you to upload files from your computer and into the web hosts especially HTML files.
The web hosting company then provides you with a set amount of services supported by what plan you’ve got subscribed to. Some of these services include things such as:
#1. Storage Space
Acts much like the drive of your pc. Every element in your websites like text, images, video, sitemap, and other files will be quantified into data.
Some websites can total up to many megabytes to some gigabytes worth of storage space. Web hosting companies store them in their servers and a few even provide a backup of the whole website.
#2. Bandwidth
Refers to the packets of data that a server can handle within a given period. This determines the quantity of traffic that a website can accommodate.
As a general rule, the larger the website traffic, the more resources are needed from the server.
Most basic web hosting plans allow tens of thousands of visitors a month. While many expensive packages can go up to several million visitors a month.
#3. Uptime
From time to time, data centers encounter problems that will affect the performance of the websites they’re hosting. In some scenarios, this may cause websites to go offline and become inaccessible over the web.
Uptime refers to the consistency of the web host to keep up the website of its online status usually in a year. The industry average is 99.95% of the time, which translates to only a few hours of downtime.
#4. Loading Speed
Another factor that contributes to how fast the website loads on the browser is that the loading speed of web hosting companies.
Websites hosted on larger and more powerful data centers usually have faster loading speeds.
This is crucial if your website is quite large and contains thousands of web content as they tend to load slower than smaller websites.
Furthermore, Website hosting is usually measured in the amount of disc space you’re allotted on the server. And also the amount of information transfer or “bandwidth” you wish for accessing the server.
As an example, if you’ve got lots of customer interaction at your website, like files to download, you’ll access the server frequently and you may need more transfer space than someone who simply enters readable text on their website.
Types of Web Hosting
Web hosting companies offer different types of hosting so they will serve the needs of different clients.
Whether you would like to make a WordPress blog or own a large online business and are in a dire need of an intricate company website. Here are the five main types of web hosting:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Cloud hosting
- WordPress hosting
- Dedicated hosting
It’s best to begin small and when your site reaches higher traffic numbers, upgrade to a more advanced type of plan. In any case, we’re going to describe each one in more detail.
#1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most reasonable to start a new blog. Actually, Shared hosting is a kind of host, where your website is on a server that is shared by other websites.
The advantage of this setup is that the shared cost. You can pay as little as $5 to $10 per month for sharing an excellent server with probably hundreds or thousands of other websites.
It lumps together different websites during a common server wherein they share the resources of a given hard drive. However, it typically has less storage space and limited bandwidth.
#2. VPS Hosting
Virtual Private Server (VPS) is comparable to shared hosting wherein several websites are hosted during a server. A VPS could be a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine.
While each VPS instance shares hardware resources, it’s allocated an obsessive slice of the computing resources.
However, their data and resources are partitioned equally which prevents unpredictability and allows the installation of other online tools like Secure Shell access.
#3. Cloud Hosting
One of the latest innovations in hosting technology, the cloud allows you to store your website’s data during a larger network of data centers.
This permits the server to be more flexible in terms of allowing more traffic even during a large spike within the number of visitors.
Cloud Web Hosting refers to a reasonably new hosting technology that lets many individual servers work together so it’s like one giant server.
The advantage of cloud-based web hosting is that if you get a bizarrely large amount of website traffic the web hosting plan can accommodate the surge of traffic – instead of shutting your website down.
If your website is growing and you’re driving more traffic to your website, this is probably the first point you’d upgrade to from a shared hosting plan.
#4. WordPress Hosting
A type of hosting geared for WordPress users. It provides not only hosting but also takes care of most admin-related tasks like WordPress installation, uptime monitoring, daily backups, and uptime monitoring.
However, this kind of hosting usually charges a premium and is more geared for small to large businesses.
With the increasing popularity of WordPress as a web-building platform, many web hosting servers are offering what is mentioned as “Managed WordPress Hosting”.
In a nutshell, WordPress hosting could be a service where the web hosting provider will keep your WordPress installation up-to-date which might help protect your site from security threats that will allow hackers into your website.
While not as inexpensive as shared web hosting, this is a good option for both start-up businesses and established businesses that use the WordPress platform.
#5. Dedicated Hosting
When you have dedicated hosting, it means you’re renting one physical server from a hosting company. You’ll have full if you would like it.
With a dedicated server, you do not need to worry about other websites on a shared server absorbing your resources and slowing your website down.
A dedicated server is usually the best level of server you’d need if your online business grows into a presence that’s getting lots of website traffic.
While the prices of a dedicated server are significantly higher than shared hosting, your business will be at a point that will easily afford the required costs of getting your own server.
There are lots of Affordable hosting is out there, you simply need to search for it. Website hosting companies offer different hosting packages at a cheap price. Keep in mind cheap website hosting isn’t always best.
Our advice is to search out your exact requirements needed for your type of website, as an example, How big is your website database, how much traffic does your website receive?
Why Good Web Hosting is Important?
There is a couple of reason why web hosting is very important. When you’re thinking about building a brand new website, your choice of host is perhaps one of the last things on your mind.
But, neglecting to decide on the proper host can have bad effects on your website—and your business. Any successful business will have a successful website as a foundation.
These days, you can’t skip out on good website hosting services for this very reason. How are you to own a successful, profitable online presence, if you’ve got a poor website that suffers downtime?
Here are the explanations why you should invest in good hosting for your business:
#1. Search Engine Ranking (SEO)
If your website is down often when search engines try to visit and analyze it, then your ranking is badly affected. Alongside the downtime effects, it’s believed that a slow site may harm your rank on search engines.
So, it’s in your best interest to speculate on professional website hosting platforms in order to make sure you get accurate and the absolute best search engine rankings.
#2. Website Load Time
It is not a decent idea to allow your website to be slow and amateur. a fast website offers a much better user experience overall for the user, which is imperative to how they feel about your site and your business.
This is often important because a sluggish website will put visitors off, and make them less likely to remain, thus increasing your website’s bounce rates. But with a fast website with the best web hosting, visitors are more likely to convert.
They will be pleased with how responsive the website is, and thus they’ll stay longer and are more likely to convert into customers.
#3. Website Downtime
A poor web host will mean your website is more likely to suffer by being unavailable or disrupted.
It’s general knowledge that a site with poor web hosting is probably going to suffer issues because the host won’t protect the website. If your site goes down then you’ll be able to lose customers, lose revenue, and lose their trust.
#4. Better Support
The issue with poor web domain hosting is that if anything does fail, you won’t be properly supported through it. You may lose your information, your stats, and your business, generally, if something goes wrong with the site and you can’t fix it.
Any website downtime or disruptions means very bad things within the way of stats, search engine rankings, and conversions, so get ahead of the difficulty.
Get the best web hosting so that they can support you. Such as back-ups of your data, and tools when something is disrupted.
#5. Website Backups
A professional hosting platform that features a reputation will protect your website because it’ll back up your data.
This means that you simply can restore your information after an attack or issue by using these protected files from your web host. It’s a secure, responsible thing to try and do.
#6. Better Security (https)
Hosting with a secure IP address and a decent web hosting company means you’re on your way to enabling HTTPS on your site. This offers a safer site where sensitive information is protected.
This is often also referred to as SSL (Secure Socket Layers). What this all means is that any information that passes through your website is automatically encrypted, thus hidden from the broader web.
Hackers won’t be ready to get their hands on sensitive, personal, or private information from your site.
FAQs: Web Hosting
What is web hosting and why do I need it?
Web hosting is a space that makes it possible for your website to be accessed by everyone on the internet. It is basically the space that you buy on a webserver to store your website files. You need a web server in order to show your content on the globe. This is why you must need Web hosting.
What are the different types of web hosting?
Web hosting providers offer different kinds of hosting packages in order to fulfill customer demands. There are five types of hosting: 1. Shared hosting 2. VPS hosting 3. Cloud hosting 4. WordPress hosting 5. Dedicated hosting
What is the difference between a website and a domain?
A domain name is an internet address that’s most commonly used to identify websites and email addresses. For example, this website’s domain name is (www.passiveblogger.com) A website is a combination of web pages on the internet, that lives on a certain domain name. When anyone enters a domain name into their web browsers they will redirect into a specifics webpage. It could be the collection of pages, files, data, and images that make up the final product that’s visible on-screen.
Conclusion
Web hosting is a crucial service that helps you to create a website or even help you succeed in your online business. While there is much technical stuff that happens between your website and the host server.
Before buying a website host avoid a cheap web hosting plan. A good service always costs you a few bucks so spend some time researching the entire web hosting options you have available.
Here you also can pick our recommended hosting like Bluehost, HostGator, Hostinger many more. Or you simply jump in our recommended hosting list, without even worry you can pick any of them.
I hope you better understand why you need web hosting, what to look for from your hosting company, and you’re on your way towards choosing the best web hosting for your needs.
I hope that this article was able to explain to you about web hosting and its inner workings.