Web Hosting 101: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
Whether you’re eager to do business online, share your portfolio, or start a blog and share your thoughts with the world, you will need a website. And if you’re starting a website, then you’re going to want to become familiar with a little thing called web hosting.
A cornerstone of any website, web hosting can seem very complex, especially if you don’t have any prior knowledge or experience with servers, domains, bandwidth, and all the other technical jargon.
Luckily, we’re going to demystify the world of web hosting so you can grasp the basics and make the best decision for your website.
Let’s dive into it!
What is Web Hosting?
Of course, before we can get into the complexities of web hosting, we should define what it means.
First, an analogy to put everything into context:
Let’s say you just designed a beautiful model house and want to show it off to people; you’ll need a plot of land to place it so that people can visit. Web hosting is like the plot of land (server) where your model house (website) can sit, be visited, admired, or engaged with (contacting you, making a purchase, etc.)
The plot of land is connected by roads (the internet) that allow people from around the world to visit your model house from anywhere, anytime. Without the plot of land, your model house will remain inaccessible and unseen.
Similarly, without web hosting, your website won’t be accessible. Thus, choosing the right web hosting service is crucial to ensure the visibility and accessibility of your website.
To be a bit more specific, when you subscribe to a web hosting service, you essentially rent a space on a server where your website’s files (HTML documents, multimedia files, etc.) are stored digitally. The web hosting provider maintains the server in data centres, which are necessary to serve the vast amounts of data on the internet to users who access it locally from their phones and computers.
Web hosting not only provides the physical server space for your website, but it also takes care of server management, security, maintenance, and software updates. All of this is essential to keep your website running smoothly with minimal downtime.
In summary, web hosting represents the resources and technology needed to make your website accessible, fast, and secure for visitors. Understanding the role of web hosting is the first step towards creating a successful online presence.
Types of Web Hosting Services
Now that you understand the role of web hosting let’s dig a little deeper into the various types. Each type offers distinct features tailored to different needs, from small personal blogs to large, traffic-heavy business websites.
Here’s a breakdown of the most common types of web hosting to help you find the best fit:
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is when your website resides on a server and shares resources with other websites. Think of this like carpooling for your website; everyone gets where they need to go while saving some money.
A disadvantage of shared hosting is that performance can be inconsistent because CPU and RAM are being shared between all sites on the server. For example, if one website suddenly gets a lot of traffic, it can slow down the performance of the other sites sharing the server.
This makes shared hosting a good option for beginners, those with small websites (like portfolios), or people with limited budgets.
Explore our web hosting for personal websites.
Dedicated Hosting
For a heavy-duty website that needs the best possible performance, security, and control, dedicated hosting is the way to go. As the name suggests, dedicated hosting is when an entire server is dedicated exclusively to your website, ensuring that 100% of the resources go towards its upkeep and maintenance.
While this option comes with the highest price tag, it provides the most robust and reliable hosting for your website, with the ability to customise server settings to your specifications. For example, unlike a shared hosting environment, a dedicated server allows you to install any software or tools you want to enhance the website or create custom backup schedules and recovery solutions tailored to your data policies.
Dedicated hosting makes the most sense for high-traffic business websites, where a period of downtime or slow performance can mean the difference between generating important sales or enquiries.
Explore our dedicated business web hosting services.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
On the continuum of web hosting options, VPS hosting sits comfortably in between shared and dedicated hosting. With VPS hosting, your website shares a server with other websites but operates within a virtual environment with specifically allocated resources. So, while the total pool of resources will still need to be shared, it will be shared equally between each website, ensuring that one site’s needs don’t negatively impact the others.
This setup provides more stability and control and is more suitable when you have outgrown shared hosting but don’t necessarily need dedicated hosting just yet.
Cloud Hosting
This relatively newer type of hosting utilises a network of virtual servers that host websites, offering remarkable scalability and reliability. If one server in the cloud network encounters an issue, another immediately takes over, ensuring uninterrupted service.
Cloud hosting is excellent for websites experiencing rapid growth or fluctuating traffic levels.
WordPress Hosting
As the world’s #1 content management system (CMS), WordPress has its own special type of web hosting that includes features like one-click installations, automatic updates, and dedicated WordPress support.
At Creative People Web Hosting, we specialise in platform-specific web hosting for WordPress and other platforms like Joomla, Drupal and Magneto.
Learn about our best-in-class WordPress web hosting services.
How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider
Ok, so we know all about the types of web hosting out there, but how do you choose a service provider? Since you’re relying on them to keep your website running, making the wrong choice can be disastrous.
Let’s examine some of the key factors to consider when choosing a web hosting provider:
Uptime Reliability
Uptime reliability is a standard guarantee you should expect from any quality web hosting provider. It is expressed as a percentage that represents how often your website is up and running over the course of a year. You should always opt for a web hosting provider that promises 99.9% uptime reliability or higher.
No matter how good a hosting provider is, it’s realistic to expect some level of downtime due to server or network issues. These things happen and are all part of what you pay to have handled on your behalf.
*At Creative People Web Hosting, we guarantee 99.9% uptime reliability across all our hosting plans. When you consider there are 8760 hours in a calendar year, this translates to a maximum total of just 8.76 hours of downtime annually.
Security Features
One key aspect of web hosting you can’t afford to ignore is security. With cyber threats becoming more and more sophisticated, and even big sites like Facebook, Yahoo, and Dropbox falling victim to cyber attacks1, neglecting the security credentials of your prospective web hosting provider is like driving without a seatbelt.
Ensure your chosen web hosting provider offers robust security features, such as SSL certificates, firewalls, regular backups, and malware scanning.
*We use Corero DDOS Protection & Fortinet Firewall to keep your website protected 24/7, and all our hosting plans come with a Free Comodo SSL Certificate.
Speed and Performance
Your website’s loading speed is crucial to providing a responsive website that people won’t immediately leave out of frustration. Website speed is also critically important for search engine optimisation (SEO)2 if you want your website to rank high in Google search results for the products/services/content you offer (Google never wants to send people to a slow website!)
With this in mind, make sure you choose a provider you know will deliver fast website speeds and robust performance.
*Our hosting plans use 100% local Australian servers, ensuring the fastest speed and performance for your website.
Customer Support
As with any managed service you invest in, you’ll want your chosen web hosting provider to have top-notch customer support. The best providers will offer 24/7 support through multiple channels, including live chat, phone, and email.
*With Creative People Web Hosting, you get your own dedicated tech support team to provide personalised and responsive support that you can ticket anytime through our customer portal.
Scalability
As your website grows, your hosting needs will naturally evolve. The more content you want to serve users, the more resources you’ll need to access.
Select a provider with scalable hosting options, allowing you to easily upgrade your plan to accommodate increased traffic and resource requirements.
*We offer hosting plans that are customisable and scalable to your needs. If you know your website has unique hosting requirements, enquire about our custom hosting plans.
Additional Services
Web hosting providers often offer extra services such as domain registration, email hosting, website builders, and eCommerce tools. Assess whether these additional features align with your website’s needs and if they offer convenience and cost savings.
At Creative People Web Hosting, we offer a suite of additional services, including business email hosting and setup, domain registration, , and more.
Start Your Web Hosting Journey
We hope this article has given you a solid foundation on the role of web hosting, the different types of hosting available, and how to evaluate your options for a hosting provider.
Embarking on the journey of launching and maintaining a website is a considerable undertaking, and choosing the right hosting provider is the most important first step you can take.
At Creative People Web Hosting, we pride ourselves on offering an honest, robust, and great-value web hosting solution for Australian webmasters.
Browse our hosting plans to get started, or contact us at info@creativepeoplewebhosting.com.au with any questions or inquiries.
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