Without hosting provider or company, your website or blog would be invisible. It simply wouldn’t exist in the digital world. You can compare hosting as a hostel where people of different ages, occupations, and interests, rent rooms on various floors of the facility and explore the city to which they have arrived. Hosting has the same function for websites and blogs of different businesses and topics as the hostel has for people. Hosting is a place in which a company that owns it charges websites to host them in the online world.
Knowing that hosting may affect many features and enhance or corrupt your platform, logically, you want the best hosting service for your website. You wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself if a bad hosting ruins all the good work that you’ve done, or paid someone to do it, in designing a website and creating content, right? But, how to select a proper hosting provider for your dream website?
What Are the Needs of Your Website?
Before starting your quest for a hosting provider, think about what are your needs and goals regarding the website. Also, explore the website structure and content, that is, get to know well with how many pages it contains and how much traffic do you expect. These things will be decisive in helping you determine how much server space you need.
Hosting should help you achieve your goals, not to extinguish them. Your requirements and needs matter the most! If you conclude that, for instance, you need a lot of space due to good traffic, choose the hosting that will make this happen, like dedicated. This way, you won’t lose traffic as you would lose it by paying for a shared server who limit the amount of disk space and bandwidth you’re given by the provider.
Which Type of Hosting to Avoid and Which to Choose?
Shared hosting and free hosting are suitable for websites that don’t have many visitors but not for those with massive traffic. Free hosting has its good and bad sides but the main benefit is that you won’t pay a single cent for it. It’s completely free and you can perhaps use it for the start of your blog, afterward, when your blog attracts more audience you can think about moving to some hosting which offers more benefits compared to this type of hosting.
Shared hosting is also a suitable solution for websites with fewer visits and content. It means that you share the server with a few more websites. That limits the space provided for your website and doesn’t allow the capacity of your platform to expand. It also can’t endure massive traffic, so it often suspends websites with a lot of visitors. One more thing doesn’t go into the favor of shared hosting – if a problem occurs with any of the websites on the server, it may interfere in the way other websites work and limit their traffic.
The VPS (virtual private server) is probably the best combination of the most affordable and good hosting for websites with good traffic. It provides the opportunity to get more space if necessary and allows the independence of all the websites on the server. If there’s interference in the website nearby, you’ll have no problem with the functioning of your website. VPS offers quality support and utmost privacy to users. You have full control over the installed operating system and apps.
There’s DMCA ignored hosting that allows you to put any kind of content on your website without risking to lose it due to shut down or even arbitrary takedown. Such type of hosting is good for specific niches such as gambling and politics. Also, such services offer good security features, offshore (outside the US) locations, clear policies, etc. While you are choosing which DMCA Ignored hosting service is best for you, pay attention to the fact that many of them can be purchased with bitcoin, which means complete anonymity for you. Even though such services sound to be rare, there’s a whole list of such hosting providers and they are considered to be trustworthy and reliable.
A higher level of hosting compared to VPS is a dedicated server. It offers more resources than VPS and gives you the opportunity to lease the entire server and all of its functionalities for your website only.
Pay Attention to the Equipment of the Hosting Provider
After you have decided what kind of hosting to pick, pay special attention to the equipment of a provider, especially to the technical capabilities of the hardware. For example, it’s important that your hosting provider is using SSDs (Solid-State Drives) and multi-core processors to provide fast data access.
If your provider uses local datacenters as well, you’ve made a great choice. That’s because a closer server means faster data flow and immediately available tech support if some problem occurs. This is all essential due to the importance of the website loading speed. Who wants to wait forever for a website to open?
Knowing that a lot of traffic may cause a crash of your website, there are hosting providers who offer as much as 100% uptime. It’s nearly impossible because some slight server problems always happen. Better trust those providers who don’t give promises like that. Scheduled interruptions to the website are even desirable, unlike unexpected interruptions. That’s a sign of poor hosting quality. Avoid these providers! Cheaper the hosting, the greater the loss of traffic.
Your Website Must Be Fully Secured
Imagine that one morning you wake up and everything that existed on your website, that is, the text, photos, videos, ads, etc. are gone. Yes, it’s possible. It would be a nightmare, right? Nobody wants to start everything from scratch – to pay a web designer, developer…. Today, hackers can easily intrude into badly protected data systems. To prevent this from happening, get informed on which hosting companies have advanced security technology and on what level, and how much it invests in the security of the users in case of an attack on a website.
Your hosting provider must do the website backup for you. In that case, you don’t have to be afraid of hackers or data loss. With the backup service provided by the hosting, you can also easily restore the latest version of the website without re-creating all the content if you move to a different server. Read blogs to find recommendations of experts, not customers’ reviews on the company’s website, search forums, and social media groups to learn the reputation of a particular hosting company.
Good hosting is the backbone of a successful business. Many people make the mistake of putting the price ahead of the quality of service providers and their features. The wrong choice leads to spending money in vain and even losing the website. Those clients who think of their future will always choose quality and reliable hosting providers to have more visitors and make a profit.
