Website Hosting – How To Choose The Right One

You decide to build a website and first thing you want to do is choose the right type of website hosting. What is the right type of website hosting depends on what kind of website you are building.

What is Website Hosting?

In order to have your web sites accessible on the internet, they need first to be hosted on a server. Server is a physical machine (computer) with a large storage room and high performance capacity so it can store all your site files and images and process the requests coming to your site.

Those servers are run by a different website hosting companies which offer the services to you, the client.

Some of the website hosting companies are: Siteground, Bluehost, Digital Ocean, Inmotion, WP Engine, etc.

They all offer different types of hosting packages that will described more below.

Types of website hosting

We will describe the following website hosting types:

Shared Website Hosting

As the name suggests this is a shared hosting, meaning, there are multiple sites running on same server. Not just yours, but also other people’s website. This is the basic hosting type and it is great for simple entry-level websites. It is very cost-efficient hosting type because the resources of one server are divided between multiple sites.This hosting is great for beginners who just started their online presence and sites which don’t have high traffic. If you have up to about 25 000 visits per month than Shared Hosting is the reasonable choice.

If you are expecting higher traffic per month on your site, than it is better to choose some other type of website hosting that can handle the traffic better.

Another con is that shared hosting can not be scaled. That means if you want to upgrade or load more instances as you need them, you won’t be able to.

I used Siteground shared hosting and I am very satisfied with it and the support they offer as well as how easy it is to manage the site using their dashboard panel. Of course they offer more than just Shared Hosting. Now I am using their Managed WordPress Hosting.

I will write more detailed post on how to setup your site using Siteground and how to get around their admin dashboard. If you need any help feel free to contact me.

Virtual Private Hosting ( VPS )

A VPS is somewhere in the middle between shared hosting and dedicated hosting.  With VPS each site is hosted within its own space, but it still shares the same server with other sites, just a lower number of other sites, unlike Shared Hosting.

It allows for more customization, but when it comes to traffic it is still limited as Shared Hosting. You will get also faster load speeds than Shared Hosting.

It is good choice for user that want to install some specific packages that cannot be installed when using Shared Hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

This type of website hosting gives the owner the most control over the web site and server configuration. There are no other websites running along your website. This is just for your own website and all server resource are dedicated on running your website. It can handle high traffic and it has super fast load speed.

This all sounds good, but because it sounds good they are also very expensive. Another thing is that you will need high level of technical knowledge and expertise on how to manage and run the server and provide good security so you don’t get attacked by malware, bots or get hacked.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is the most recent types of website hosting. What it means? It means that there is a group of remote computers combining their computing power to run applications. The resources that are used are divided between several servers thus lowering the chances of a downtime if one server breaks.

With traditional hosting your site uses resources from one server and if that server breaks your site won’t be available, but in cloud hosting because the resources are shared between multiple servers, if one of that servers failed, the responsibility of that server is taken by another server and the end user won’t know the difference because your site is still available like nothing happened.

Cloud hosting is scalable, can be scaled as the need rises. If you have sudden spike in traffic and that will require more resources which will be automatically allocated and when the traffic goes down those resources are removed automatically. This means the owner only pays for what they need.

Cloud hosting is one of the most expensive types of hosting, but you get really good results. This type of hosting is usually used by sites that generate very big traffic over 1 month.

Siteground has one the best managed cloud hosting solutions.

The cloud plans that Siteground offers are fully managed by their team. That gives you time to focus on everything else that you need for your website.

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting means that the provider manages all the servers, the hardware setup, maintenance, technical support. All you have to do it place your site there and don’t worry about the rest.

Most of the entry level packages offered on by the hosting providers come with managed hosting.

WordPress Hosting

This is actually website hosting optimized for WordPress sites and usually comes with one-click WordPress installation.

There can be two types of WordPress hosting:

• Shared WordPress Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting

Shared WordPress Hosting is the same as the Shared hosting, but it may come with WordPress already installed on it. One example can be the wordpress.com hosting.

The Managed WordPress Hosting comes with enhanced security, caching enabled, staging environment and faster loading speeds.

Check out the Siteground WordPress hosting plans here.