Website Hosting Companies

What is a web host?

A web host is a company that lets you rent internet-accessible servers and storage space to host your website, web apps, or files so anyone can access them from around the world. Web hosting providers provide a hosting service, which can differ in terms of speed, storage, bandwidth, processing power, and reliability based on the type of hosting you purchase.

Why use web hosting?

If you’re looking to create a website for your small business or a web application, you will need some sort of hosting plan from a hosting provider.

Web hosting companies provide you with a secure and reliable service to host your website online. They make it accessible to people to view worldwide, helping you increase your brand recognition and reputation and provide your services in more than just the local areas where you are located.

Web hosts take care of all the server hardware maintenance, including ensuring that the servers are set up correctly for increased performance and reliability, with redundancies in place if something fails.

Hosting services can affect your search engine optimization efforts, too. Depending on which hosting company you use and where they are located can be a factor in ranking your website higher in search engines like Google.

A benefit of using hosting over hosting yourself is that you won’t need to spend the time and cost of maintaining any hardware and don’t need any specialized skills to buy hosting. You also get access to technical support if anything goes wrong with their service.

Who uses web hosting?

Everyone who wants or needs an online presence for themselves or their business will need to buy hosting.

Whether you’re an individual writing a blog, a freelancer looking to showcase your services, or an online store looking to sell your products, hosting is the backbone of what will run your website.

Here’s a list of ideas of what hosting can be used for:

• Online blog
• Portfolio website for photographers
• Personal website with CV
• Business website to showcase services
• Ecommerce website to sell products
• Informational websites
• Host a mobile application
• Host an online game
• File storage
• Online software and tools (CRM, Email Marketing, Project Management, Website Builders, Online Surveys, Social Media Platforms.. etc.)

The list goes on. Anything that you can access or do via the internet is hosted on a server somewhere in the world. Most likely at a hosting company.

Web hosting features & what to look for when choosing a web host

There are many features to look out for when choosing a web hosting seller, with each one offering a variety of services. You’ll want to pick one that offers good:

• Reliability/uptime – as a business, you don’t want any downtime where your website is inaccessible to your customers. Look out for a higher uptime percentage as close to 100% as possible.
• Storage limits – most servers use speedy SSD storage, make sure you have enough storage for the files your website has now and for future growth.
• Bandwidth limits – pick a host which offers reasonable use unlimited bandwidth if possible. Bandwidth limits can restrict how much traffic you are allowed to your website with use over your limit resulting in extra costs.
• Speedy servers – pick a provider which offers fast RAM, fast and more CPUs that are a good fit for the type of website or app you’ve created. Speed is vital for creating a better user experience for your customers and can affect SEO rankings.
• Server security – make sure that there are firewalls in place, multi-factor authentication to login to your control panel and sFTP for accessing your files.
• Server backups – don’t lose your hard work, back up your files in case of an attack or failure, this often can be purchased at an extra cost.
• Server location – can you pick where in the world your website is hosted? The location of your server can impact speed and performance. If your server is located far away from your target audience, then it will load more slowly, resulting in higher bounce rates and affecting your site’s SEO.
• 24/7 Support – make sure someone is always there to help no matter the time, any downtime can affect not only your rankings but also your bottom line.

What types of hosting can I buy?

You could purchase many forms of hosting, each one offering different performance and technical knowledge needed to run.

• Shared Hosting – often the cheapest form of hosting it shares space and resources with other customers and is best used for low traffic websites
• VPS Hosting – hosting that needs some technical knowledge to setup and maintain, comes with configurable RAM, Storage and CPUs and is faster than shared hosting.
• Managed Hosting – hosting where all updates, and maintenance is performed by the hosting company, no tech knowledge is needed which saves you time to work on what you need to do.
• Dedicated Hosting – where a single server and its resources are dedicated to you. This gives you control over the server and how you use it. Needs more tech skills to manage and maintain and can be costly.
• Cloud Hosting – a type of hosting which distributes your files across servers world wide giving you better flexibility to scale your hosting when your business grows.
• Reseller Hosting – you buy server space and bandwidth from a provider in order to repackage and sell on to your customers – good for agencies and dedicated resellers
• WordPress Hosting – hosting fine-tuned for performance and reliability with the popular WordPress CMS
• Ecommerce Hosting – hosting that is tuned towards providing better speed and reliability for online stores to improve performance and little to no downtime

Related web hosting services

Web hosting is just one essential tool in getting your website online. There are many other software, tools, and services relating to hosting that you’ll need to make your website accessible.

Domains

To access your website you’ll need to buy a domain name from a domain registrar like Namecheap. A domain is a user-friendly name that people type into the browser address bar to access your website online—for example, tuffyeti.com. When picking a new domain name, try to make it short and rememberable.

SSL Certificates

To ensure your website is secure for your visitors, you’ll need to purchase a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate. An SSL Certificate will help serve your website over the HTTPS protocol indicating to your visitors that it is safer to visit than a website that is just served over HTTP. Hosting providers and domain registrars often let you buy an SSL Certificate for your domain.

CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and can be used to help speed up your website for visitors in different locations where your website is currently served. It not only helps with speed but many of the best CDN providers also have built-in firewalls and security features to help against malicious attacks. A good example of a content delivery network company is Cloudflare.

Website Builders

If you don’t have the skills, time or technical know-how to create a website, then you can use one of the many website builder platforms like Wix to help create, and host a website without any coding knowledge. Worth a look if you are a small business or need a website up quickly.

Email Hosting

Emails that relate to your domain and your website make your business look more professional. With email hosting services, you’ll be able to set up an email account(s) and use your domain—for example…. [email protected].