Understanding What is Web Hosting and How to Choose The Best Provider
Today, a website has turned into a prominent tool to connect with the world. Whether you want to build a website to share your thoughts, make people aware of your business, sell services/products, or any other reasons – there are no boundaries to what you can do.
With a website, heaps of possibilities are available to you. But your website will work the way you want only when you will host it with a trustworthy web hosting provider.
Unfortunately, choosing a trustworthy web host is not as easy as it seems. There are plenty of reasons for the same as one is a large number of choices.
In the market, you can easily find thousands of hosting providers claiming to offer the best hosting services.
Too many choices can make it difficult to choose the right one. Today’s post will help you understand what web hosting is and help you choose the BEST hosting provider for your website.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that lets people and businesses have their website be accessible on the world wide web. While a web hosting PROVIDER is a business or entity that is responsible for offering the technologies and services required for your webpage or website to be viewed on the internet.
Every website is hosted or stored on a unique computer known as “Server”. In order to view your site, your audience will need to type your site’s web address into their browsers. Next, their computers will connect to your server and your website will be accessed by them via browsers.
Most hosting providers will need you to own a domain in order to host with them. If you do not have a domain, they can help you purchase one. Sometimes, providers run special deals under which you can get discounts on hosting services AND domain names.
How to Choose the Best Hosting Provider
A question almost all would-be webmasters ask themselves is: which hosting should I avail? Choosing the RIGHT hosting provider will give you peace of mind and excellent service. However, choosing a bad hosting provider will only give you headaches and problems. That’s why it’s crucial that you do extensive research, consider all your requirements, and actually know what a great hosting provider can give you.
Below, we have put together the only tips you’ll need to choose the Best Hosting Provider for your website.
Take a Look at Your Hosting Requirements
Before you find a hosting provider, it’s important for you to actually consider the requirements you need. Knowing the requirements you need will help you thin out your choices to a select few. If you don’t know where to start, the following questions may help you determine your requirements.
- What type of site are you creating?
- Do you require support for any particular script? For instance, PHP.
- Expected web traffic volume?
For the SEO Hacker website, we have more advanced requirements since we have blog posts that are live for more than a decade now and there are massive resources that need to load for our website to keep running smoothly. That’s why we already have our own dedicated server for this website.
However, for beginners, the most recommended route is to start with a good shared hosting plan instead of a dedicated server plan. This is because a shared hosting plan is more affordable, user-friendly, and is catered for new webmasters. Knowing this would help you lessen your choices even more.
Once you have your requirements ready, it’s time for you to consider more technical hosting factors.
Reliability of Servers (Uptime Scores)
Once you are aware of your requirements your next step should be examining the reliability of servers.
It is crucial that you choose a hosting provider that operates 24/7. After all, a visitor may come to your site from time zones all across the globe. Remember, nothing is more important than choosing a hosting that is stable both in terms of network connections and servers.
Having an uptime score of 99.9% is considered normal nowadays. Anything below this is unacceptable even if you have set up your site on a shared hosting account. Premium accounts claim to offer 99.99% uptime.
There are several ways you can check the uptime of a hosting provider. However, the simplest one is using uptime monitoring tools such as Uptime Robot, Pingdom, etc.
Know Your Upgrade Options
As I’ve mentioned above, shared hosting is a good place to start as it is cheap and it has almost all of the requirements of beginners. However, you have to factor in the growth of your website. Over a period of time, it will require more server resources such as disk space, bandwidth, email storage, etc.
In the absence of adequate server resources, your website may have to deal with issues like slow loading, frequent downtimes, etc.
For that reason, you should look for a web hosting provider that provides upgrade options. Although you may start out on a basic shared hosting plan, a hosting provider that also offers VPS and dedicated hosting services can help you make the easy transition to a new server as your site needs a more robust hosting environment.
Hosting Security Features
Since you’re entrusting your website to your hosting provider, you have to make sure that they have enough security measures that will protect your website even when unforeseen problems occur. Security features and measures are something you have to take note of since it’s really important to your website’s existence on the world wide web
Don’t hesitate to ask your provider if they monitor their servers for unexpected activities and if they have measures in place that will enable your site to still be live once unforeseen problems occur.
Loading Speed
If you’re looking into showing up on the first page of search results, your website needs to load fast – especially if you want to rank for Google since fast load speed is a part of their page experience ranking factor. So, always clarify with the hosting provider how their services will help your site load faster. This will help you in the long-run since having great load speeds can be the factor that decides if users will stay on your site or leave.
Key Takeaway
If you really want to see your website succeed, you need to invest in a trustworthy web hosting provider. So, use the knowledge contained above to choose the BEST possible hosting provider for you.
What about you? How did you go about choosing your hosting provider? Let me know in the comments below!
