Hosting a Website
In the same way a retail store needs a brick-and-mortar location to set up shop, your website needs a place for it to live as well. Instead of a physical location, websites live on servers through services called web hosting. But with so many different providers, how are you supposed to decide which one to go for? Do you take the small retail space outside of town or do you go for the space at the mall that has bundled in security services?
What is a hosting service?
Contrary to popular belief, websites don’t actually live in fluffy white clouds of data somewhere in the ether. Instead, all websites live on servers which hosts the data for the website. Not to be confused with a CMS (Content Management System) which holds and organizes your content, a web host’s job is to connect that CMS content with the world through your website. People will find your website through a domain which is sometimes called your web address.
You can think of hosting services as the landlord of your site from whom you rent space to set up shop. Lets say you rent a warehouse from Mr.Landlord and you want to put your merchandise in his warehouse and use the front of the warehouse as a storefront. When you need to sell your product, you will request for your product stored in the warehouse to be delivered to your storefront. In this case your storefront is your website, your product is your data, and Mr.Landlord is your hosting service. Mr.Landload handles how to store and deliver the data to you while you handle when, where, and how you want your data is displayed on your website. Different landlords provide different amenities and the same applies to hosting. Without a hosting service your “store” has nowhere to sell, and your “warehouse” has nowhere to deliver your stuff.
OK cool. So I just buy a hosting plan and I’m good right?
Not quite.
There are a few things to consider before you choose a host. Lets start by asking:
Think of Hosting as Renting a Virtual Warehouse
What do you need?
Are you an independent web developer that plans to launch multiple websites a month or are you a just trying to get all your vacation pictures onto a single website? Depending on what your needs are your options for hosting can vary quite a lot. Different services provide a variety of pros and cons depending on the type of hosting, and the facilities they have on offer. If you are just uploading those shaky pictures you got while riding an elephant in Thailand, then you probably wont want to shell out for the top end VPS hosting services.
To help determine how much bandwith you might need, a formula that you can use is:
Estimated Visitors per Month x Page Size x Estimated Pages per Visit = Estimated Bandwith
Plan out your future
Think of how long your website is going to last. Inevitably, you will either outgrow, change, or shut down your website. When this happens you want to be aware of any fine print that you may have agreed to when signing up to your hosting service. Financially, things like renewals and cancellations can have hidden fees or obligations. On the technical side, does the service suit your needs? Who will be managing it? Is there a helpline? Understanding what your capabilities are will allow you to better choose a hosting service.
I know what I need now. So… now what?
Patience young grasshopper. Now that you know what you expect out of your website, we shall now go over what aspects of the hosting services may affect which one you choose.
Hosting Type
Although there are many types of hosting services available, in general there are three types of hosting that are probably most applicable for most businesses, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Virtual Private Servers (VPS). These different types differentiate mainly in how they allocate server space towards their clients. Each server is essentially a high powered computer who’s sole purpose is to manage your website data.
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting you are sharing server space with multiple other people. The server in this case handles multiple websites and domains at the same time. This lowers the cost and makes efficient use of the server for the provider. For you dear reader, this efficiency lowers the monthly server cost and is great for smaller to medium sized businesses and individuals. But the main downside is that depending on who you end up sharing the server with, the performance of your website will suffer. But maintenance will be a lot easier as this will be largely done by the hosting company.
Dedicated Hosting
Tired of sharing your server space? Then dedicated hosting is the thing for you! Dedicated servers allow you to take up all of the capacity that a particular server can provide, and you are the only website that is handled by the server. But because you don’t have any neighbors to share the cost of the server, your cost will go up. You do gain more control of the server and are able to customize how it manages your website though.
If your website and business is growing and handles a LOT of traffic, a dedicated host would be ideal in order to manage everything.
VPS Hosting Cloud
Hosting clouds are the most flexible option. But they are also the most technically demanding. In a VPS, you have an array of different servers all partially catering to your website’s need. This method allows you to scale your website based on its current needs without having to change servers like you would with a shared or dedicated host. You do need to have someone who truly understands how to set up and use it as the technical floor (and ceiling) is much higher. These are better for web developers who may have varying needs or programmers.
Storage
How important is your data for you? Hosting services will sometimes provide some sort of backup for your data as part of their service offering. Often they will be referred to as some type of RAID storage which is a way of linking hard drives together. The differences are in how they optimize storage for speed, redundancy, or both. We wont go into detail but in a nutshell:
RAID 0 optimizes for speed but can be riskier as data loss on one drive means all your data is lost.
Raid 1 optimizes for redundancy but sacrifices speed. It unlikely you will lose data but you will usually have slower performance.
Raid 5 combines both RAID 1 & 0 and gives you both speed and redundancy but at the a higher cost.
Hosting companies will also tout having SSD drives which have better speed but cost a little bit more than traditional hard drives. These will usually only matter if you have large heavy files such as video that you need to serve quickly.
Other Technical Considerations
Processing Power: Usually listed as number of cores or CPU units, more is better.
Up-time: Depending on your business, having your website online 100% of the time may be critical. Other times 99.9% of the time will suffice.
Customer Service: If you do run into any issues, is there anyone you can call?
Compatibility: Some web hosting services have closed ecosystems and will only run with compatible a CMS. Make sure your hosting service works with your current systems and you should be golden.
That was a lot to go through but if you follow the guidelines above, you should be able to work out what kind of web hosting service works best for you. Sometimes differences are so minor they don’t matter and other times choosing the right one can make or break your website. But don’t worry, with a bit of research you can find the best solution for you!