I used to be ignorant of web hosting packages, servers, optimizations, and all that goes into running and maintaining a website. I recall purchasing a WordPress Managed plan for my blog after researching several web hosting providers, only to learn that I had just blown my last dollar on a server that was too small for my traffic.
Selecting an appropriate web hosting package for your website, blog, or even online store can be somewhat difficult. Thankfully, you can check a few easy things to make sure you get the finest server that can manage more than what you now have.
I started configuring my own servers, founded my own web hosting business, and finally sold it because of downtimes and a poor technical support experience. This is all the information you need to make an easy decision about the best server for your website.
Here is all I wish I had known when I began blogging, long before I began configuring my own dedicated servers for heavily trafficked blogs.
The different types of Web Hosting plans
First things first: there are a few different kinds of web hosting plans available, and each one is made to fit particular requirements, such as newly launched blogs, heavily trafficked websites that emphasize ultra-optimization, or even security and support.
Whichever features you want from your website, knowing which hosting options are best for you is essential.
1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting options are made for recently launched blogs, portfolios, and small company websites. Their low cost and ability to enable anyone to launch their own website without going over their monthly budget make them excellent. Many businesses also include excellent free tools in their shared hosting plans that enable users to install CMS platforms like WordPress with just one click.
Regretfully, even though those plans are quite affordable, they house all of the files for your website on servers that could also house hundreds or thousands of other small websites. Reduced resources for each website allows the hosting business to offer as many plans as feasible on a single server.
Because you are truly sharing your website with numerous other website owners at the same time when you choose shared hosting, it is not as quick or safe as other plans. Even while those servers are being “cut” in portions, with each owner having a separate area and a means of accessing the files on the server for its website, they are typically quite slow when your website has a lot of plugins, a heavy theme, or a lot of visitors.
Read More: 5 Important Things Professional Bloggers Won’t Tell You
2. Managed Hosting
Essentially, Managed Hosting is a Shared Hosting package taken to the extreme. They operate mostly faster because they have already been set up and tuned to work with particular CMS systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others. A few of such settings and adjustments are genuinely essential to increasing speed and maximizing resource savings on your server.
New websites wishing to launch in the best possible manner without going over budget will also find significant value in such programs. Numerous well-known web hosting providers offer affordable and quick Managed Hosting services, mostly for WordPress. Though that actually depends on the firm, such plans also come with some significant tech assistance that will help resolve any problems you may be having with your hosting plan.
A Managed Hosting plan should be your top choice if you want to build a blog, an e-commerce store, a quick portfolio, or a more powerful server to support additional plugins and services. They are far faster, more reliable, and more secure than traditional Shared Hosting plans.
3. VPS Hosting
When creating heavier, more trafficked websites, VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Servers) is one of the most often selected options. Because of their great flexibility, you can start with basic hardware and wind up using a robust VPS server that can manage thousands of daily visits.
You can start off small with a VPS server, say 1.5GB of RAM and 1.5 core CPU. A VPS server may grow with you as your website does, as you add more plugins and your traffic grows. Most web hosting firms offer particular VPN plans that you can easily upgrade from basic to premium ones.
Conversely, other firms allow their customers to increase particular components of the server’s hardware, such as the RAM, CPU cores, and disk space.
It is noteworthy that a lot of web hosting providers offer “Managed VPS Hosting,” which is comparable but already set up and optimized for a particular application, but they do not offer any technical assistance for their VPS servers.
4. Dedicated Servers
Things really become serious with dedicated servers; they can handle even the largest, most complicated, and busiest websites; they are completely expandable and versatile; and upgrading any component of them is comparatively simple. However, dedicated servers are expensive, hardly come with any type of technical assistance, and are not set up or optimized.
You can get your dedicated server from some web hosting providers with data center automation software like Plesk or cPanel installed, along with an operating system (often a Linux distribution). The corporation may include such options in the overall pricing, but the data center automation software will most likely cost an additional monthly fee.
As dedicated servers can manage thousands of visitors in real time, they are ideal for large and high-traffic websites. Except if you plan to launch a business and want to start with a powerful server that can handle significant traffic from your advertising efforts, they are not intended for new or small websites that use little bandwidth.
5. Cloud Hosting
All the newest technology joins in cloud hosting to provide speed, security, stability, and nearly no downtime. You have the option of choosing a particular cloud hosting package or more adaptable ones, such one that will instantly expand its resources as needed.
Consider that loading times will be faster than you could have ever dreamed because your website will be loaded from the closest server to the user. That means that, rather neatly, your data will be downloaded and provided through a Greek server if I, Panos, visit your website from Greece.
If that’s not enough, consider that you won’t have to spend hours waiting for your VPS or dedicated server to be upgraded so it can manage high traffic in case something goes viral, and you will have significantly greater protection. And let me tell you, it is really exhausting to manage a server with a lot of traffic. Cloud hosting makes this procedure a lot easier.
Read Also: What to do if they hacked your Viber Account?
6. Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting is essentially for those who wish to design, set up, market, and oversee their own web hosting plans. Maybe considering starting a little web hosting business? All the tools you could need to get started without going broke purchasing or renting strong servers are available with a reseller account.
You can buy all of their resources in bulk at wholesale costs, repackage them, and resell them to your own clients at a premium after doing your homework and selecting the top web hosting provider that offers the reseller option.
7. Local Hosting
When your laptop or computer serves as the server for your website, that is known as local hosting. Since they allow you to make all changes in a testing environment rather than on your live website, locally hosted websites made using tools like XAMPP are ideal for testing.
It basically allows you to build new websites, install several WordPress installations, and run as many tests as you want without even having an internet connection. Naturally, without a URL, nobody will be able to access such websites, but they work fantastically for everything else.
Understanding Technical specifications
Knowing all there is to know about web hosting, how can you actually select, for your purposes, the best Shared Hosting, Managed Hosting, VPS, or Dedicated server/plans? What if I told you that all you needed to do to always verify before buying a hosting package was concentrate on these ten easy things?
- CPU: A server can manage more, including heavy websites, high traffic, bandwidth usage, a range of installed plugins and services, and so forth, the more CPU Cores it has. For a portfolio, beginning blog, or anything else that doesn’t require a lot of resources, 1.5 CPU cores work wonderful. For more sophisticated websites looking for some extra performance and solid starting resources, two to three cores work well.
- RAM: To put it simply, more RAM on your server translates into more real-time processing capacity, concurrent service execution, and seamless operation even on busy days. While you get something comparable in Managed Hosting plans and VPS Servers, but with a higher CPU and fewer users using the same server, most shared hosting plans offer you between 1.5GB and 3.5GB of RAM for the most cost plans. Contrarily, depending on the server’s use, dedicated servers might have anything from 16GB to a large quantity of RAM.
- Bandwidth: While few still have restrictions, the majority of web hosting providers now days offer unlimited bandwidth with their plans. While bandwidth measures the amount of traffic your website/server receives each second, having unlimited bandwidth does not imply that your website can accommodate an infinite number of monthly visitors because the CPU, server, and disk space will be more important.
- Innodes: Among the relatively few factors that most website owners overlook and misunderstand, innodes lead to poor decisions. Generally speaking, most web hosting providers offer some form of innode restriction, which can be quite problematic if your website requires a lot of handling of files. Essential data on a file or directory, including file sizes, permissions, ownerships, timestamps, and file kinds, is contained in each inode. If you’re moving from another provider, be sure your website won’t be using more Innodes than your web hosting package can support.
- Disk Space: You are most likely already familiar with this concept since it is as easy as saying that you can upload more files to your website the more room you have. For a new blog, company website, or portfolio, 10GB of storage space is a great place to start; even tiny e-commerce sites can typically get by with anything over 20GB.
- Email account(s): The quantity of email accounts your hosting package allows you to set up. While it varies by organization, cheap plans often allow you to create one email account (with your domain name, such info@example.com).
- SSL Certificate: If you want your visitors to be able to browse your website without seeing a notice that it is unsafe, then an SSL Certificate is extremely essential. SSL is the mechanism that converts the URL of your website from HTTP to HTTPS, therefore encrypting everything. Every domain name requires an SSL, hence if you plan to build three websites, you will also require three SSL Certificates.
- 1-Click CMS Installation: A 1-click CMS installation tool is essential for quick and simple installation if you want to build a WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or any other website that will run on a CMS platform but lack the technical know-how to manually build a database, set up the platform’s files, and so on.
- Backups: Although it should go without saying, a lot of website owners overlook to verify the backup plan offered by their hosting provider. It ought to be OK if you are receiving daily automatic backups. However, if your package includes no backups, you will need to utilize a third-party plugin to handle that for you, which will take up more of your own disk space.
- Support: Having stand-by help is essential if you lack the knowledge to set up, optimize, and resolve any problems on your server. Numerous issues can arise with websites, including server-side problems that might require more complex fixes.
You now understand everything there is to know about selecting the best kind of web hosting and what technological features to search for and compare. Regretfully, that’s not the end of our guide; you still need to learn about all the well-known web hosting providers and their offerings. You could come across something unique if you read on.
How to choose the best Web Hosting company
Choosing the best web hosting for your requirements is crucial because such providers may vary in terms of plans, pricing, services, tools, speed, restrictions, downtime, and everything else offered.
Prior to making a purchase, be sure you thoroughly investigate the hosting provider and the opinions of others. Start with TrustPilot, a fantastic site to read company reviews, and then go to Google to find out even more. Though evaluations don’t always hold up or provide the complete picture, it’s always encouraging to see that many businesses do respond and provide an explanation.
Remaining with the most well-known and reliable web hosting providers is always a better idea because most of them offer the newest technology and greatest stability. Remember the freedom you have to easily upgrade your plan without having to completely move to a new server. Utilising fast technologies like Hostinger’s LiteSpeed plans—which are among the fastest—try to employ servers with NVME SSDs.
You could want to ask your hosting provider to email you the monthly resources that your website is utilizing if you’re not sure how to accomplish it so you can compare them to the features of every web hosting package you come across.
Has the book made your decision on a web hosting package clearer to you? What, in your opinion, is missing if not? Any comments or opinions on selecting the ideal server for your requirements would be much appreciated.