Meaning & Types – Forbes Advisor INDIA

An online service that helps you make your website’s content reachable on the internet is called web hosting. It is like a space on rent on a physical server that will store all the website’s data and files when you buy a hosting plan. 

The web hosts service provides the resources and hosting technology required for operating your website securely and effectively. Web hosts are responsible for implementing security measures, keeping the server up and running, and ensuring data like images, and texts more files and data are successfully transferred to the guests’ browsers. 

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service online that allows you to publish your web application or website through the medium of the internet. When you access web hosting services and sign up through different devices like desktops, tablets and mobile, you are renting a space on a physical server that lets you store all kinds of files and data that are required for your web application to function effortlessly. 

The web hosting service provider configures, maintains, and runs physical servers that can rent your data and files. Website services also provide added functionality like security, backup and performance that saves you time for you to focus on important functions of your web application or website. 

How Does It Work?

A website hosting server is a physical computer continuously running to make sure that your site is available for visitors around the clock. Purchasing servers for web hosting will let you store the data and files of your website in the servers of your web hosting provider.

When you sign up and create an account with your choice of web hosting service provider, the provider allocates you some space for the website on its server. You can easily manage and access the space provided from your hosting account’s dashboard. 

You can also access other resources, like a central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM) and bandwidth. The type of web hosting service that you choose decides the percentage of resources you receive. 

The web hosting plan is similar to renting an office space. The popular and cheap expensive option is to rent a coworking space. As your organization grows, you can rent from an entire office to an entire building. You can similarly begin with free hosting on a server that is shared with various other web applications or websites. 

With time, you will want to upgrade your plan to more exclusive web server access or even wish to lease an entire server. 

What are the Types Of Web Hosting?

There are many different available web hosting options in the market. It is a challenge to decide which one is the best web hosting server for your website. Web hosting offers hosting packages for personal blog creators to business website owners. 

Preferably, you should begin with a simple hosting solution. Once your site grows and gets more traffic, you can upgrade to an advanced plan. 

Let’s see the different types of hosting: 

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) web hosting type allows you to share a physical server with other users. The web host in this hosting creates a virtual partition for every user. It is the best hosting option for medium-sized websites, shops, large blogs and e-commerce with a rapid increase in the number of visitors.

Advantages:

• Excessive customization
• Dedicated server space
• Root access to the server

Disadvantages:

• The users need to be technical experts to manage it
• The cost is affordable but with the high technology, some users might need to hire a developer who can manage the virtual server which can increase the total cost of web hosting.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting means the web hosting service gives the user shared access to their web servers. The only difference is no users will get access to the main data or the root directory. The internal data is safe, secure and not shared with other users. This web hosting type is best for personal blogs and websites, new or small businesses and owner-operator and sole traders webpages.

Advantages:

• Easy to set up
• Cheap monthly fees
• Built-in database software and site builder 
• Capacity to host multiple sites on a single account

Disadvantages:

• Less control of the server configuration
• With growing traffic, the cost may rise to

WordPress Hosting

This type of content management system (CMS) web hosting gives a WordPress-optimized server environment to help your site load fast and also minimizes its potential issues. This plan comes with amazing features like pre-installed themes, plugins for security and caching and other tools. 

Advantages: 

• Beginner-friendly
• Low cost
• Pre-installed themes and plugins
• Customer support team

Disadvantages:

• If it’s a non-WordPress website then this type is not an ideal web hosting choice. 

Cloud Hosting

Cloud Hosting web hosts use scale and sharing of resources to drive down hosting costs and boost website performance. If one of the cloud hosting servers tends to be busy then the hosting provider directly routes the traffic to different servers. This enhances the performance by increasing the cost of hosting. 

This hosting provider is best for complex websites, e-commerce sites, small and medium businesses, large organizations with several domains and lastly government and non-government companies. 

Advantages:

• Great reliability and availability
• High flexibility
• Automatic data backup and scales up or down depending on the requirement
• Increased security

Disadvantages:

• Expensive
• At times root access is not provided

Dedicated Hosting

This hosting plan dedicates a designated physical server for each site. If you choose this hosting you can configure the server, select desired operating software and system and customize the hosting environment according to your specifications. It is best suited for large businesses, organizations with multiple domains and complex websites that require a great amount of processing power.

Advantages:

• Complete hold and control of the server configuration
• Availability of root access to the server
• High reliability

Disadvantages:

• Expensive
• Users need to have the high technical knowledge to operate

Features of Web Hosting

Most web hosting service providers have different packages and plans of hosting. It can range from free to paid, depending on elements like website size, webpage traffic or peak time website, features that you can need and daily number of website visitors. 

Let us explore various features that will help you decide which server is best for your website.

Disk Space

When you are evaluating your storage requirements because you will need space to store your emails, images, web files and databases consider your future website traffic and growth. Low or insufficient desk space impacts user experience, so desk space is an important factor that you should consider while selecting a hosting service for your website.

Email Accounts

Link your email account to your website name. Many web hosting services provide you the option to do it. The types of email accounts are as follows:

Forwarding mail: The forwarding mail accounts redirect emails to different email addresses. The account can be a third party that manages your website emails or a personal email account.

FTP Access: It refers to file transfer and sharing on a website. Many web pages have documents like image files or PDF files that they wish for internet users to download. The web hosting services use FTP access to provide this service. 

POP3: Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) accounts give server space to you to store emails, which can be easily accessed directly or by using email client programs. 

Aliases: Some of the web hosts have email plans that can be used to create email accounts or several alias names without the need of creating a complete POP3 account. For instance, you wish to display just sales@, orders@, or support@ on various pages of your website. Rather than having multiple POP3 accounts that need to be administered or checked, you can redirect everything to a one-and-only inbox.  

Data Transfer and Bandwidth

The terms data transfer and bandwidth are often used interchangeably in the web hosting world. But they are two dissimilar things. Bandwidth is the quantity of data that your website can transfer to visitors at a single time and data transfer is the real amount of data that it transfers. 

For example, image bandwidth is a water pipe. If the pipe is bigger then more water can pass through it also, for various reasons you will not utilize the total capacity of the water pipe.  On the other hand, data transfer is like the actual quantity of water that passes through the water pipe in a given time frame. 

Selecting the best web hosting service for you can be a task but if you analyze the above features provided by each service provider it will be easy for you to decide which suits best for your website. 

What Is The Difference Between Web Hosting And Domain Name?

To set up your website you need to perform a domain name search and then buy a domain name. The most important things that you need to publish your website are hosting and domain. They are different but hold equal importance. Hosting is used to store data on your site and a domain name is the official website’s digital identity that allows people to easily access your website. 

A domain name generally consists of the name of your website and an extension of the domain such as .org, .net, or the common .com. There are a lot of other alternatives that you can consider and new names like .xyz. 

You can purchase hosting and domain either separately or from the same provider. Some service providers offer domain registration too. To begin with, choose a domain name and its availability. Once you choose a name of your choice, register it with a domain registrar. If it is a different company than your hosting provider, purchase a hosting plan and accordingly point to the domain name. 

The best choice would be buying a hosting plan that already includes free domain name registration is way simpler and affordable. Nevertheless, if it’s not possible then you can migrate the website to a new host. You just have to be sure that your website’s framework is supported by that company.

Bottom Line

It is a very important decision to select the best web hosting server for your business. It requires a lot of analysis that includes where and how to host your website. 

The initial step to build your online presence be it blog, online business, or any other type of website is to sign up for a hosting account. Web hosting service enables your website to be accessible online. The above mentioned details will help you make a wise decision while choosing the web hosting company for your business.