Which Hosting Option is best for Me?
Select A Topic Below, or Scroll Down to Navigate this Post
Introduction
Hello! If you are here it must be because you are somewhere along the process of setting up a website. This might be your first website, or it could be your second, or maybe it’s your fiftieth. Regardless of experience, we are here to help you decipher the best path to go forward.
What is Web Hosting
Web Hosting is a service that allows businesses and people’s websites to be accessible through the internet. For a website to be reachable, it must be placed in a server, which will be preprogrammed with all the necessary data-transfer protocols to allow people to access only very specific points in the server.
As of lately, web hosting services have expanded their reach, offering products such as site-builders. Some made that their whole thing. You might’ve heard of Wix or Squarespace. These are the two most widely used website builders currently out there. After someone uses these sites to build their own, the new website is accessible all across the internet. This is because Wix and Squarespace both include web hosting within their platform. Ultimately hosting is where they get the most of their revenue, as members pay monthly to keep themselves on the platform.
If you are building a website on Squarespace, then Squarespace as your hosting option makes perfect sense. The website is, after all, tailored and self-contained. However, you might be working on a web-app or the next Amazon. Here your needs will change, and it is important to understand how to match those needs to a particular solution.
Technical Requirements
Let me throw some techy-jargon at you: bandwidth, server disk space, CPU clock-speed, and caché. These are the main points you want to examine to figure out your technical requirements. Don’t worry though, we’ll explain everything in human.
Bandwidth: A measure of how much data can be transferred through your server. Proportional to how much activity (page loads, comment submissions, etc) can happen before the service provider will start throttling your page speeds. Most hosting providers now show bandwidth as a monthly value, often in terabytes (TB). Depending on your website, as little bandwidth as 50 GB can allow around 25,000 visits to your website per month.
Disk Space: How much storage space you have on the server. 3 GB is usually more than enough for most business websites. This one takes only 2 to run! As we add more blog-posts and content this number will slowly start increasing. We optimize all of our images and files for this purpose.
Caché: Unlike the previous two terms, which were dependent on hardware, caché refers to the process of keeping track of the most used items in a server to facilitate and speed-up loading times. Some servers offer amazing caching, while others offer none at all.
So, what are my options?
All this being said, and considering that you have not gone with a website-building platform you have two main categories: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. What’s the main difference between the two? Shared hosting means that the server you are using is being shared by multiple clients at the same time, each of which will have one or more websites running on it. Dedicated, on the other hand, means all of the server’s resources are being dedicated to one client.
Think about it like renting a place. One can rent out a room at a busy apartment complex, for example, and they would have that room to themselves. However, to get in and out of the building, only one route exists, used by everyone. This is analogous to hosting your website on a shared server. Hosting on a dedicated one would be more like renting an entire house to yourself. Does your website need an apartment or a house? If you answered ‘apartment’, keep reading.
Our Favorite
SiteGround is one of the most reliable hosting providers out there. It is our top pick for sure, and the main reason for this being how good they are at helping customers solve their issues. That is why we use them and probably will keep on doing so for many more years. All of their plans come with automatic backups and SSL encryption, and the tiered options have an amazing built-in caching system. On top of that, they’re amongst the cheapest hosting options out there.
Runner Up
Another company that does a terrific job at web hosting is IONOS1&1. Their value is showcased by their reliability, which is comparable to SiteGrounds. Additionally, their pricing is super competitive. Possibly the cheapest prices on the market. One more curious pro to IONOS1&1 is its domain service. When you register, you’ll get your first domain for just $1.
And then there’s us
We take advantage of SiteGround’s reseller program to further customize hosting spaces and specifically tailor them to our needs. As WordPress websites are what we specialize in, our hosting plans are based on the requirements to run such a site. If you would like to learn more about our hosting plans, click learn more.
Leave A Comment