Before you start building a website, you would be required to pick a web hosting vendor. Commonly people go directly to vendors such as Vodien or resellers like Adssential Marketing (Dedicated Dreamscape (parent of Vodien reseller with 99% uptime service level agreement). Selecting an appropriate web hosting service partner is important as some web-hosting providers do not provide a wide selection, which may affect your business processes down the road.
There are free web hosting services available in the market, however, they do come with some downsides. Free web hosting does not have unlimited bandwidth which reduces your website loading speed. Anything more than 10 seconds could cause a consumer to leave the website, thus increasing your bounce rate. Apart from high bounce rates, free hosting services also means advertisements which most searchers that are put off by. There’s also a limited uploading bandwidth for free hosting services.
Should you pay for web hosting services?
Uptime (reliability)
Reliability is extremely important and this should be a given for paid hosting services. You don’t want to be consistently experiencing downtime when your website is suppose to be available 24/7. A site that is hard to reach will lose visitors. If someone is unable to access your site, they would not hesitate to visit your competitors’ site.
Traffic/Bandwidth
Understand the limitations on bandwidth for your plans, if your site encompass a lot of videos, audios and images that require high bandwidth, you would want a plan to match your website needs. If you are unsure on how to estimate your bandwidth and traffic, you may contact us for a non-obligatory web analysis.
PHP, Cpanel, SQL, FTP
Ensure your web hosting provider gives you the access without a need for host approval. If you need to, password protect your folder or edit your htaccess file to prevent hotlinking or bandwidth theft. SSH access is useful for maintaining databases when a blog or content management system is running. Ensure access to FTP for you to transfer files easily for web creation. Lastly, always make sure a cpanel access is available for you to manage different ftp accounts, emails, web hosting materials, ssl and other web relevant information that requires you to update to have a fully functional website.
Multiple Domains Hosting
It’s common to own more than one domain as they’re cheap these days and it is hard to resist owning a few. In this case, you would need to accommodate for extra domains and hosting space. It is possible to host more than 1 domain from a single account. Each separate website should be an add-on domain.
Technical support
Things can go wrong at the most inconvenient of times so it’s best to check with your host on their professional support. You do not want to be facing an S.O.S situation and have no technical support at all.
Types of web hosting
Living in a digital age with strong advancement in technology, different types of web hosting have been introduced to meet the different needs of websites and customers best. Here are 4 main different web hosting service:
Shared Web Hosting
A very basic web-hosting model that is cheap and easy to set up. A good fit for small medium business that do not have huge amount of traffic. Shared hosting as the name suggests will contain other websites that utilize the specific IP address. Although such web hosting services are cheap, we should carefully review such share hosting options and ensure your provider is able to provide proper technical solutions. You do not want to end up facing an issue with your website and having to contact someone from overseas to have your issues rectified.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting (sometimes referred to as managed hosting or a dedicated server) provides entire servers to rent. It is relatively expensive as compared to shared hosting and would be recommended for websites that have a lot of traffic or would require more server control.
There is more to dedicated hosting than providing a single website with entire server equipment housed in a data centre. It allows us to perform self-service server administration and technical control. You will have high flexibility in controlling and managing security settings, however, a well experience technical engineer would be required to implement technical solution and issues in dedicated hosting.
VPS Hosting
Virtual private servers (VPS) also known as virtual dedicated server (VDS), a hybrid system that consists of both shared hosting and dedicated hosting. The closest for VPS would be that we are able to configure the server in accordance to how we would like it. It is a server that appears to each client as a dedicated server although it’s actually serving multiple websites. VPS are often used by websites that require high flexibility in terms of configuration and technical aspect that is similar to a dedicated server without the high cost.
Cloud
Cloud hosting is the latest hosting type in the market that is extremely popular in the market. This type of web hosting service operates across many interconnected web servers that supply affordable, scalable and reliable web infrastructure. You can upgrade and pay as per use when different infrastructures are required. Cloud hosting plans typically offers unmetered, reliable bandwidth and have large disk space available. An effective method in running resource intensive websites or applications that require certain functions that required to be scaled up.We have gone through the whole process of web hosting, from choosing a web hosting provider, the pros and cons of free and paid web hosting as well as the different web hosting available in the market. For more information on web hosting, website building, read here. If you’re looking for a hosting professional to have your website managed, Adssential Marketing does the heavy lifting while you concentrate on your business. Contact us now!