What Is Website Hosting?
Website hosting is the service that hosts your website and it’s files on physical hardware maintained by the hosting company and makes it available to your visitors around the world.
In other words, it’s where you store your website’s files and content and it’s also what serves those files to visitors when they access your site (by typing in your site’s domain name).
Every single website has some type of web hosting behind it, whether it’s a big website like YouTube or your some hobby blog.
When you purchase web hosting, you’re essentially renting space on a computer. This could be part of a computer that you share with other people, an entire computer.
Once you have your website hosting, you can start putting it to use.
Different websites will have different hosting needs when it comes to the resources that are needed to power the website.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is where many people start their hosting journey because it’s one of the most affordable ways to host a website.
With shared hosting, your site/account will share resources with other accounts and websites on the hosting server — hence the name.
By sharing resources like this, hosting providers are able to keep their costs down and offer rock-bottom prices.
That’s really the only benefit of shared hosting — it’s cheap. Shared hosts also typically advertise high-resource limits such as “unlimited websites”, “unlimited storage”, and/or “unlimited bandwidth”.
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as truly “unlimited” hosting and every shared host will still apply a “fair use” policy. But still, shared hosting can be a very affordable way to host multiple websites because of this.
While the low prices of shared hosting are attractive, there can be some very real downsides when it comes to performance, reliability, and security. For example, if the other accounts that you’re sharing resources with are consuming a lot of resources, that could have a negative effect on your site’s performance because there aren’t enough resources to go around.
For this reason, many people move beyond shared hosting once their websites start growing, as other types of hosting can offer major upgrades in key areas like performance and reliability.
VPS Hosting
With VPS Hosting your website gets its own dedicated resources to handle any load you throw at it.
The key differences between shared hosting and VPS Hosting — instead of sharing resources, you get resources that are 100% dedicated to your site. This generally leads to improved performance because you don’t have to worry about someone else’s websites affecting your site.
With VPS Hosting you get the following two types of services:
- Managed – the hosting provider will configure and maintain the server for you.
- Unmanaged – you’ll be responsible for configuring and maintaining your server.
All things equal, unmanaged hosting will cost less than managed hosting because the host is offering extra services with the managed option (and those extra services cost more money).
In general, non-technical users will almost always want a managed solution. However, developers might prefer unmanaged hosting for added flexibility and/or cost savings.
Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting? Which one is best for me?
Well, the answer two these depends on your requirements if you’re just getting started in the web publishing space you’re better off with shared hosting. Once you start getting more traffic you can move on to a VPS. We will be posting a guide on how to migrate from shared hosting to a VPS.
