Beginner's Guide To Web Hosting

Table of Contents

What Is Hosting And How Does Web Hosting Work?

In short, web hosting is a service that stores a website’s data on the internet. Think of it as an apartment renter: you pay a monthly (or yearly) fee to live and store your things on their property.

This is exactly what a hosting provider does. They rent out a server for people to store and run their website data on.

Depending on your needs and technical knowledge, you can choose between a couple of different types of hosting.

Different Types of Web Hosting

Web hosting companies typically offer several hosting plans, such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting refers to a setup where many sites are all hosted together on the same server. This hosting plan is best for beginners and those who don’t need a lot of resources.

Pros:

  • The resources are split among the clients, this helps keep costs low
  • It allows users to personally maintain their site

Cons:

  • Traffic spikes can disrupt every site hosted in that server
  • You don’t get the freedom to fine-tune various settings as you would with your own server

VPS Hosting

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) simulates multiple individual servers partitioned on one central server. It gives you more control and power, however, to manage VPS hosting, you need advanced knowledge.

Pros:

  • Dedicated amount of resources per user

Cons:

  • Hard to manage
  • No support
  • Steeper price tag

Dedicated Server

This plan is when you rent out the entire server for yourself. It is like owning a house. Dedicated Servers are best for business’ sites that require high performance and loads of resources.

Pros:

  • The highest level of resources
  • An unparalleled degree of freedom

Cons:

  • The most expensive plan for web hosting
  • Requires a lot of technical knowledge

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a team of servers working together to provide hosting. It is the best combination of shared and VPS hosting plans.

Pros:

  • Allows multiple computers to handle high traffic websites
  • Cheaper than a dedicated server

Cons:

  • Usually doesn’t have access to the root directory
  • The configuration file (php.ini) is not available
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ecozeen

I'm a software engineer with a wealth of experience building web solutions for personal brands and organizations.

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