23rd September, 2019 |
Web Hosting, Server
Choosing the right web hosting is one of the most important tasks when you are about to create your online presence. Remember a time difference of one millisecond can make a big difference and a delay of one second makes you lose a bunch of potential customers. Apart from price, there is a lot of things that you need to take care of while selecting a web hosting plan.
Before we move ahead, let us first know about what is web hosting. Web hosting which is also known as web-server or hosting is just a computer with server software like apache and has a static IP address. This computer is kept on 365 days a year and is kept under a high-security facility. Website files are stored or hosted on a similar web host and people all around the globe can access them via standard protocols.
Before I process any further, let me make it clear that you must never go for a free web hosting. reasons being simple, you cannot claim if anything goes wrong and you will always find an important feature missing.
Hostings can be of two types. It is either a dedicated hosting or shared hosting. now let us understand each of them.
You must have seen a big apartment where we have lots of rooms. Consider the whole apartment as a server and your room as shared hosting. When you rent a shared hosting, the owner of the apartment gives you the key and that room becomes you. Now you can do anything you wish inside the room and no one has a question about it. You do not have to pay for the whole building and you get the advantages of the security and other utilities. In other words, you have to worry less.
Now besides these facilities, you also gain certain facilities like bringing in your own furniture, decorate your own wall and you also control who can come in and who cannot. You have many neighbors who share the same building and the associated facilities. Similarly, one server can have thousands of shared hosting all having their separate environment and all sharing the common resources.
But with this comes a few rules that everyone must follow. You cannot start loud music at midnight. You cannot conduct illegal activities nor you can start breaking the walls. You also don't use up all the common spaces provided or block the stairs. You have to work mutually to maintain a peaceful and secure environment. If you need a plumbing or electrical job, you need to contact the Administrative department or the owner. There is also a limit of how many people can visit you at an instance. Thus shared hosting is a good plan if you are having a small or medium-sized website and you have a little knowledge of managing a web server.
Now you donot have any of these these limitations and you have full access to everything when you buy or rent a whole apartment. This will be like dedicated hosting. Now this will let you do anything you wish but will not be cost-effective if your website is not generating very high traffic or is not bringing in enough revenue. This is something that you must take when your website has grown very big. You can also get a dedicated server if you have multiple websites that you wish to run from a single server.
Now, this has certain drawbacks too. This kind of hosting is not for you unless you are an expert and hold a good knowledge of the web hosting technology. You will have to set up everything, deal with all setup and security issues and you will have very less support when there is an internal problem. These are also one of the costliest servers and need a great budget.
There is a third kind of server available which is something between the shared and dedicated. It is known as a virtual private server. In this technology, virtual computers are created. The person taking it to get the feeling of a dedicated server but comes at a lower price. This is somehow better than shared hosting but still costly. However, nothing can ever supersede a dedicated hosting.
Now when you have chosen a server, you need to check on a few parameters. The most important is the server location. The server must be located closest to your market. Like if you have potentials customers in India, then you should choose a server that's located in or is close to India. This saves you on the latency time and your website opens faster in that country. This also gives you a better performance in search engines.
Another thing that you must prefer is the drive type. Normally an HDD(Hard disk drive) is the storage used everywhere. Still, you can find some hosting providing SSD(Solid-state Drives). SSDs are around 20 times faster compared to the ordinary HDD but the price is very high too. So is you think, this is a great presence to rank better and provide a better user experience. WEBNext Labs provides SSD hostings at a very lower price.
You must also buy the space accordingly. Suppose your files for the website is of 800 megabytes. now buying a plan that gives 1 gigabyte of storage will not be a good idea as your files may increase and web files need some space for temporary working. Again, buying an unlimited plan shall also not be a good idea. a 2gb plan shall be good to go. Also, check if your hosting provider allows upgrades.
Also, check if the hosting provider has support. That's something which you will really need at times.
About the Author
