In today’s digital age, perhaps the most important asset to any business is their website. This is how you portray your brand to the world and will often be the first point-of-contact with a customer as the internet is where consumers turn when looking for any kind of product or service. This means that you must have a website that is of the highest standard and a good representation of your brand. This will include reliable web hosting for high-performance, reliability, and security. Here is all that you need to know about web hosting so that you can publish your website with confidence:
What Is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that publishes your website. It involves paying a fee (usually monthly) so that you can use their servers to publish the site, plus in most cases, you will also get a wide range of additional features.
Types Of Web Hosting
As you might imagine, there are various types of web hosting and it is important to shop around the find the best deals and providers. Here are the main types to consider:
Shared Hosting: Shared hosting involves having your website on the same server as a number of other websites. The key benefit of this is that it is much more affordable and is therefore considered the entry level of hosting. This does mean that performance may be impacted and you may struggle with high traffic.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: VPS divides a server into virtual servers which enables a website to be hosted on its own server but still sharing with a few other users. You will benefit from root access to a virtual space and secure hosting, but performance can still be somewhat limited.
Dedicated Server Hosting: Exclusive rental of an entire server for maximum control, performance, and security. As you would expect, this is an expensive hosting option.
Cloud Hosting: A team of servers (a cloud) work together to host a group of websites so that multiple machines can be used to handle high levels of traffic. An emergent way of running websites in the cloud involves creating Docker images to run static HTML websites using Nginx that are deployed in a cloud service like AWS. There are a few simple practices to follow in order to ensure you’re running secure containers.
How To Choose
It can be tricky to decide what the best type of web hosting for your brand is and then to find a provider. It will depend on the scale of your operation and what your budget is, but no matter what type you choose, it is important to shop around to compare deals and make sure that you are getting a good service with a range of additional features.
Every company needs a great website which is fast, responsive and able to handle traffic easily. This will come down to web hosting and this can be a complex and daunting area if you do not know much about it. Hopefully, this information will help you to understand and choose the best host for your particular company.