An EffiMedia Article:

Essential of Web Hosting Explained.

Hosting, the counterpart of  real state in physical world.

By  EffiMedia.

You’ve just been interested in getting a Webpage to expand your business or personal brand and are ready to undertake the journey to build your new website. If you are at that decision point, Congratulations! Now you may be wondering why you have to pay for web hosting? What is web hosting? And why do I need it? These are questions that will find answers in this post.

How Does Web Hosting Work?

When you want to start a business in the real world, you need a physical location to set up, store, and sell your products. The same rules apply in the digital world when setting up a website.

When you set up an online business, you have a series of files, images, and HTML code that make up your website. These files take up space and need a place to be stored. Without an online home, your files would just sit on your computer and no one would ever see them. A hosting provider will provide a place on a webserver to store all of your files and are responsible for delivering the files of your website as soon as a browser makes a request by typing in your domain name, the thing that would not happen if your site resides on your personal computer disk space.

When you pay for hosting services, you are simply renting storage space on the internet — just like you would rent a physical store for your business.

What is a Domain Name?

Before we go into more depth, let’s talk about domain names. When you first thought about starting an online business, your very first step was choosing a name for your business and purchasing a domain name. A domain name is simply your company’s address on the internet.

Think of it this way: if you are renting space at a physical location for your business, you give customers your street address so they can find you. If you are renting space on the internet, you need to give customers your domain name.

Whenever someone types in your domain name, it is converted into an IP address. The hosting company then locates all the files connected to your IP address and returns all the information related to your business pictures, videos, and words that make up your website.

Just like every street address is unique, so is every domain name. Whenever you start a new website, you get the opportunity to choose a name that perfectly reflects your brand.

What is a Web Hosting Provider?

A web hosting provider is a company that enables businesses and individuals to make their websites available through the World Wide Web. The services that web hosting providers offer will vary but usually include website design, storage space on a host, and connectivity to the Internet.

How to Choose a Hosting Provider?

When selecting a provider it is important to consider the different types of hosting services that are offered. Here are a few things to consider when determining where you would like to host your site.

• What type of website are you building? eCommerce, blog, portfolio, etc.
• Based on the type of website, what is the bandwidth needed to run your site Can you create email addresses for your domain? How Many?
• What type of hosting options are available?
• Do they provide SSL Certificates?

After selecting an internet hosting provider, finishing your domain registration is easy! Often instances your web host can additionally be your domain registrar.

Web Hosting options or plans to choose from

If you are looking to host a website for your small business, there are many web hosting provider that offers a variety of hosting services to suit your needs. Once you have chosen your provider, you will need to create a hosting account and determine what type of hosting will work best for your site. Next you’ll see a list of potential hosting services you can choose depending on your needs.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting and is suitable for most online business owners. With shared hosting, several customers share storage space on one powerful server. There are several advantages to shared hosting including:

Affordability — It’s much cheaper to share the space on a server than to rent the entire machine or dedicated space.

Ease of use — Your server is preconfigured, well-organized, easy to use, and automated, your hosting company does all the maintenance and security updates for you.

Dedicated Hosting

In this plan, rather than sharing space, you get a server all to yourself if you choose a dedicated hosting package. Advantages to dedicated hosting include but are not limited to:

Customization — You can customize the software and hardware to meet your individual needs.

Unlimited Resources — Since you don’t share the server with anyone, all the storage space is yours.

Full control — You can configure the setup however you’d like, the way you like.

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a hybrid plan, this type of hosting includes all the features of a dedicated server, but at the price point of a shared server. Here are some of the top reasons VPS hosting might be a great fit for you:

Functionality — VPS hosting is built on a cPanel and supports easy navigation with several intuitive tools.

One-click features — You have access to one-click installs of WordPress, Magento, and Drupal to cover most of the website builders available.

Easy site navigation — The clean interface makes site management a piece of cake.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is often considered the most reliable of all of the services. Rather than relying on the physical disk space of a single server, it pulls its power from several resources, making sure you never have any downtime. Other benefits include:

Scalability — You can add to your cloud space at any time.

Unmetered bandwidth — You don’t have to worry about your site going down due to a server failure.

Things to Expect From your Hosting Provider

Domain Names — Most hosting providers require users to have their own domain name prior to getting the hosting services. Competitive hosting services usually offer domain name services, some even offer this service for free within their plans.

Email Accounts — With a domain name (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com) you can customize email services to reinforce your brand. Most web hosting services offer Email account creations as part of their plans. With email account features provided by your hosting company, you can create domain email accounts (e.g. yourname@yourwebsite.com) that will provide more credibility and strength to your business brand. Keep an eye on the size of your business, that will determine the plan is best for you and the scalability available for future growth.

FTP Access — The use of FTP lets you upload files from your local computer to your web server. If you build your website using your own HTML files, this feature will let you transfer the files from your computer to the web server, allowing your website to be accessed through the internet.

WordPress Support — WordPress is an online website creation tool. It is a powerful blogging and website content management system, which is a convenient way to create and manage a website. WordPress powers over 25% of websites on the internet. Most hosting providers will tell you right away if their plans are WordPress-compatible or not. The simple requirements for hosting your WordPress websites include PHP version 7 or greater; MySQL version 5.6 or greater. Your web hosting services must be able to provide that capability.

Conclusion

In order to publish your website online, your business website requires a web hosting service. However, a web host gives business owners more than just web hosting services! it always includes in-house technicians clients’ websites are up and running 24/7, customers service support to website owners in need of help, domain name renewal, and more). The key takeaway for you here is “selecting a professional web hosting service is critical to ensures a hassle-free experience for your business”, the more carefully you select your provider will ensure you can efficiently focus your time and effort on managing your businesses.

Recommended  Articles:

• Web Hosting Explained
• Choosing the Ideal Web Hosting
• Key Features of Free Web Hosting
• Free Web Hosting, When to Jump In?
• 5 Reasons Why Paid Hosting is the Best Choice