Do you want to start a blog or online store? Then you’ll need a website. But did you know you’ll also need web hosting to get your website online? There are many aspects to web hosting, and you might not be sure what it entails. You have to choose a host, a hosting type, and many other things. That’s why we wrote this guide, to help you understand what it is and pick the right host for your site!
Let’s start with the basics. Web hosting is a service that makes sure your website is accessible through the internet. The pages and files that your website consists of live on a server. Whenever someone visits your website, that server sends over the necessary ‘files’ to display your site to the site visitors. This server is owned by a web hosting company, and you can rent space to store your website files on a server that meets your needs. Without web hosting, your website simply can not exist.
It’s also good to know that, although it doesn’t have a direct effect, your choice of hosting impacts your SEO. Reliable hosting improves the security, speed and uptime of your website. All factors that tell search engines that your website is trustworthy and a good option to show to their users. Upgrading your hosting plan or switching to a new hosting company can therefore improve your site performance, just make sure to choose reliability and your website’s needs over low prices.
So, where do you start? By looking at web hosts or hosting companies. These companies provide servers and internet connectivity in a data center. In other words, they provide space for your website’s data, so it can exist and other people can find it.
The first choice you have to make when picking the right host for your site is whether you want to create a fully-hosted or self-hosted website. The difference is pretty self-explanatory. Fully hosted means every site on the platform is hosted on its own servers. These companies take care of all the hosting stuff for you, such as Shopify and WordPress.com.
Self-hosted, on the other hand, means you’ll have to arrange hosting yourself. A good example is WordPress.org. Now, you might be thinking: why would I want to do everything myself? And while it’s true that self-hosting is extra work, it also means you own all the data yourself. Plus, you get access to the full codebase and can choose your own hosting company.
These days, there are thousands of companies to choose from. They all have their own benefits and hosting plans. So, how do you pick the right host for your site? What should you focus on? First, it’s important to take a couple of things into account.
As those real estate TV shows always say: location is everything. It’s not necessarily everything when it comes to hosting, but it is important. Where your host’s servers are located is an important factor in your site’s speed. Why? The smaller the distance between your audience and your server, the faster your website is. For example, if your audience is located in the US but your host is based on the other side of the world, that could slow down your site for visitors, which is something you want to avoid.
Second, consider what kind of website you want to create. This impacts how much storage space you need to acquire. For example, a small blog needs far fewer resources than a big online shop with thousands of products. Consider how many pages your site will have and how much content it will have. If you already know you want to build a large website with many large images and videos, you’ll need to look at hosting plans with more storage space.
We know this is a hard one to answer. But you might already have an idea of the number of page views you want to reach. Take this number into account when deciding on a hosting company and plan. Because every time someone views a page on your site, it adds to the amount of bandwidth you use. In other words, all the texts and images on that page need to be downloaded onto each visitor’s computer before they can be displayed in their web browser.
