If you are considering taking your business online and are comparatively new to website hosting, this article is perfect for you. Many businesses are considering having a digital presence, especially since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, to facilitate customers in remotely accessing their businesses through websites.
There are multiple web hosting services available. But if you are a small business and are new to the workings of websites, a Shared Windows or a Shared Linux Hosting solution can be perfect for your website hosting requirements.
What is Shared Hosting, you may ask? Shared Hosting is an economical and convenient hosting solution for small businesses. But before we jump to the various hosting solutions, let us begin from the beginning and understand what website hosting is and how to get on with it.
What is Web Hosting?
When you want to make your business website accessible to the entire world over the internet, you need a hosting service to host your website. Website hosting is nothing but uploading your website’s files from your local computer to a special computer called a server. This server makes these files globally accessible to website visitors.
A web server receives an incoming customer request and responds to that request by displaying the requested content on the user’s browser. Therefore, you need a web hosting provider who can offer you server space and a hosting solution for hosting your website.
What do you require for Web Hosting?
To host your website, you require these two crucial prerequisites:
- Web Hosting Provider: A web hosting provider helps you host your website by allocating server space for your website and storing its files. Hosting providers handle server management and other backend tasks on your behalf.
- Domain: If you wish to host your website on your own, you require a domain name. A domain is your website’s address that people will type on their browser to access your website. For example, hostingawebsite.com. You can purchase a suitable domain name from a domain registrar company.
What are the various web hosting solutions available in the market?
There are multiple Windows and Linux web hosting services available and you can choose them based on your website’s hosting requirements:
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Shared Hosting
A Shared Hosting Server hosts multiple websites on a single server whose resources are shared among multiple websites hosted on it. It is an ideal hosting service for new and small websites, blogs, and budding entrepreneurs. Shared Hosting is a highly economical hosting solution than others.
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VPS Hosting
Virtual Private Server or VPS Hosting is similar to Shared Hosting. The only difference is that each website gets its own Virtual Private Server with exclusive resources that are not shared with other websites. It is the second-most economical and reliable web hosting solution after Shared Hosting for growing websites. In addition, it gives you root server access and a flexible hosting solution.
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Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting is the costlier yet the most reliable hosting service, since a website hosted using Dedicated Hosting can leverage the fixed and exclusive resources of the server dedicated to solely hosting it. Website owners can customize and configure their web servers per their hosting needs and achieve seamless scalability. Dedicated Hosting also provides high-level security and faster loading rates.
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Cloud Hosting
If you are wondering what Cloud Web Hosting is, know that it is a unique hosting concept that significantly brings down hosting costs and provides higher scalability and uptime with its unconventional hosting model. In Cloud Hosting, your website data is hosted on a network of cloud servers. As a result, this hosting solution offers high scalability, reliability, uptime, redundancy, and security at competitive prices.
Summing Up
This article is meant to provide a basic understanding of the working of web hosting solutions and the types of web hosting services available. However, a critical step towards hosting your website is choosing the right and befitting hosting provider and plan as it significantly impacts your website’s growth. Therefore, buy hosting solutions that match your website needs for a quality website hosting experience.