This overview is meant for beginners in the online space. If you have just started out exploring possibilities of owning your own website and you don’t know even a bit about how you can host your site, then, this guide is for you. This article intends to give you an overview of web hosting. Once you are through the article, your understanding of the business of website hosting will be immensely improved and your confidence in making a decision about web hosting boosted considerably.
What is a Domain Name?
If you ever thought of owning a website, the first thing that you need to do is to find a name that suits the purpose of your website or one that you like. By definition, a domain name is simply the address that your prospective visitors will use to reach to your website. Any website URL is made up of alphabetical letters and numbers followed by a dot and an extension. The most popular choices for extensions of domain names are .com, .org, and .net. If you have not yet bought your domain, try find a suitable domain name here and buy at huge discounts.
What is Web hosting?
If you intend to own a website, then, the second thing that you ought to know is that, you do not need to go and ask daddy about it at all. Any website to be precise is a collection of files that comprise of images, data, html codes, videos and other sort of things based on specific needs. Now, to be able to access these files on the internet, these files must be placed at a location that is accessible through the internet. Now, comes the role of the website hosting companies. They provide the space to host your website’s files, and hence are called web hosts.
What are the different types of web hosting?
The little confusion that you may get in finding a suitable web host may sometimes be too daunting to allow you to proceed further with choosing a web host. So, to make the matters simple, here we are defining the different types of web hosts that are available.
The four main choices for website hosting are:
A hosting solution is basically a place to store the files of your website. Hosting spaces are available in different storage sizes, speed of the server where your files are hosted, reliability of the hosting servers, and reputation of the hosting company. A shared hosting server allows different website owners to store their files on the same servers by sharing the space and resources with all others’ websites. Although all websites are not equal in terms of the resources they require, shared hosting is the cheapest and best solution for a beginner who is just starting out in the business of website ownership. If you have not done yet, you can find best and cheap web hosting here.
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) divides the resources of the server as per the plan that you purchase and is available only to your websites. The space, memory, bandwidth required for your website are fixed as per the plan that you purchase from your hosting company. A VPS is recommended for websites that have moderate amount of traffic and for which you require more control of the features and software that you need to manage your websites. A VPS hosting plan is considerably more expensive that a shared hosting plan. Buying a VPS plan was never so easy, buy it here.
Dedicated Servers are where you rent out an entire server for your websites. Such plans are more expensive and offer you greater control over the sites that you host on your dedicated server. Dedicated servers are recommended for websites that have high traffic and for companies that have staff that can take care of different aspects of managing their own hosting servers. A dedicated hosting server gives you absolute control over what software and security features are available to your websites and your visitors. Dedicated hosting plans are more expensive than shared hosting plans and VPS hosting plans. If you would like, you can find a suitable Dedicated Hosting plan here.
Cloud Hosting is meant for websites that experience sudden surges in the visitor traffic. This type of hosting is normally offered by companies that have large server farms where a large number of servers are available that share the load of multiple software and websites. Cloud hosting servers offer flexibility in terms of the resources that you need to buy for your websites. If the resource requirement of the website is not always high, then cloud hosting is the best way to go forward. Although costlier than shared hosting plans and VPS hosting plans, cloud hosting plan offer you the flexibility to scale as per demand or as per automated load balancing features. Find the best, cheapest, and most extensible cloud hosting plan here.
Although the website hosting dilemmas for you might not yet be over after reading this article, your understanding of the fundamentals of what website hosting is and about the different type of website hosting plans must be better by now. To get more clarity you might consider visiting this link and compare hosting plans that you wold like to choose for your websites.