In this article, you are going to learn everything related to web hosting for your blog, step by step.
I am going to cover topics from what is a web hosting to benefits of web hosting and why web hosting is important, is buying web hosting the only choice you have, what about free hosting, best hosting providers, and Faqs, etc.
This blog is packed with information.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog,
What is web hosting?
Basically, web hosting is a service provided to store/place your website or blog or any online application on the internet so that it can be easily accessed by other devices on the internet.
Essentially, the websites are stored on specialized computer software called servers.
If you are not aware of what servers are, then.
According to Wikipedia, a Server is a piece of computer software or hardware that provides functionality for other programs such as
- Sharing data or resources among various clients.
- Letting your website being accessed by people, etc.
The place where the servers are located is called Datacenters.
Graphic image.
Now that you know what is web hosting, let’s understand how web hosting works?
How does web hosting work?
Big companies rent out their services so that people can buy them to store their websites.
Once you host your website on their servers with a domain name which is the name of your website.
When another device tries to view your website typing domain name in their browser, their computer gets connected with servers on which your website is hosted on, and servers pick your website and display it to users who searched for it in their devices.
Here is a graphic diagram of it.
What are the types of web hosting and their pros and cons?
Here is a table of types of web hosts, its meaning, functionality, pros, and cons of each.
| S-no | Hosting type. | Meaning | Functionality | Pros | Cons |
| 1 | Shared hosting. | A couple of websites are hosted on a single server sharing resources on the server. | A bunch of websites is hosted on a single server, limiting their resources like sharing a room flat with your friends. | Cheap.
No technical knowledge required. Easy to get started. For beginner websites and blogs. |
It is about sharing resources, if one website has more visitors, it might affect your site performance in loading speed. Not scalable. |
| 2 | Virtual Private Server [VPS] hosting. | It is the same as shared hosting yet the number of websites shared is lower than on shared hosting. | The main server is split into multiple small servers customized and designed according to the respective websites. | Dedicated server resources.
Higher loading speed and uptime of the website. Cost-effective than others. |
Still has limitations in terms of control. Still sharing a couple of websites on your main server. Not as easy to set up. |
| 3 | WordPress hosting. | As the name sounds it is for websites on WordPress which is the largest CMS on the internet. | Almost the same to shared hosting, but more optimized and focused on WordPress such as enhanced security, caching, and loading speed. | Pre-installed WordPress on the host.
Enhanced WordPress security and speed. Optimized for WordPress more. | Less control and still like shared hosting, if one website is having more visitors, it takes more resources which might affect your site’s loading speed. |
| 4 | Dedicated hosting. | Unlike the name shared, dedicated means fully for your kind of server. | The entire server is for you alone, no sharing nothing, giving you access to a lot of configurations with your server. | Complete control of your server.
High security. Higher loading speed and uptime of the website. |
On the expensive side. Demands for some technical knowledge. You are completely responsible for the server, support is there. |
| 5 | Cloud hosting. | It is like parallel storage of your website with multiple servers other than a single server. | If one server is down due to repair or some error, another server will handle the website because the website is hosted on multiple servers, not one. | Higher scalability.
Higher uptime of the website. High security. |
Pricing is not always fixed. Less customization there. |
| 6 | Reseller hosting. | As per the name, the reseller means resell the hosting. | You are a middle man buying hosting from companies and selling it to clients for better prices. | Improve prices.
Get better income. Increase services in your control. |
Need a lot of clients and trust to make sales. Good knowledge of the technical side to manage things for your clients. |
Why web hosting is important & general Benefits of web hosting?
In this part, you will learn why web hosting is important for your website or the benefits of using web hosting on your website.
Well, you know web hosts are places where you store your websites including all your pages, text, videos, images, everything on a place, they are your assets.
Because they are your assets, you want them to be safe.
1. Safety and security of your website.
Your web host is important for the safety of your website including yourself.
Here are a few things to consider while talking about the safety of your website and a better user experience on your website.
SSL certificate:
The secure socket layer [SSL] certificate helps in the safe transfer of the information between servers.
It is done by the process of encryption, which is a method of converting your information into a secret code that hides the meaning of the information.
It is a very important part of user experience if your website has to do with online payments and use of credit cards on your website, SSL is key.
Because the customer is typing his information and pins of credit cards, if the information is not managed well, it can be hacked.
SSL help that information from not being hacked or misused.
Most web hosts provide SSL certificates for free.
Here is a graphic image of it.
Firewall protection:
As the name refers, it is a network that takes care of looking at the traffic of your website and protecting your website from any threats on the internet.
When you buy a web hosting service, almost every hosting service would have this included in their plan even in the most basic one because safety is ultimate.
Safe and secure data centers:
If you do not know what a data center is, they are places where the servers are located.
Normally, the web hosts have a 24/7 monitoring of the data centers because the safety and security of data centers are critical.
If something happens like natural disasters, hacks, etc to safeguard them gets critical.
Technical support and guidance for your website:
If you mess up things on your website, you will have your hosting provider service to approach solutions.
Every hosting provider provides customer support it is up to you to decide which hosting provider and which plan to choose to get the best and reliable hosting support for your website.
This is one of the major reasons why web hosting is important because they will help you solve your problems if you mess up things here and there on your website.
Other than these to ensure your website is safe and secure, you should consider following the below things.
- Have a strong password for your WordPress login.
- Take regular backups of your website using updraft plus which is FREE.
- Upgrade your website to a higher PHP version of WordPress.
- Install spam software and other useful safety plugins.
- Look at & manage the permissions of your website.
2. Performance of your website:
In the performance, I am talking about the Uptime and loading speed of your website which are the most important parts of websites yet they are largely dependent on a web host.
Let’s understand the website speed first.
Web host = Loading speed of website:
It is when your web host server takes time to display your website on the user’s computer when searched about it on the internet.
No one wants to visit a website that loads slow.
Website loading speed is Google’s top-ranking factor because the higher the loading speed of a website the bounce rate of the website increases which is a negative thing.
Having a web host, not just a basic one but a quality web host helps you nail loading speed.
There are some other minor factors that influence website loading speed, they are.
- Browser caching.
- Using CDN.
- Excessive code, HTML, CSS, and javascript.
- Images size used on the website.
- The theme of the website.
The next thing is the Uptime of your website, this thing is totally dependent on your web host.
Web host = Uptime of your website.
Your web host’s servers are solely responsible for the uptime of the website.
For those who do not know what uptime really means.
Uptime is the amount of time the website is accessed on the internet which is determined by the functionality of your web host’s server.
If your web server is not available or not operational your site gets down.
That really affects your website.
The reason is, your website is located on the internet.
The Internet is present all over the world.
This means people from all over the world where the internet is present can view your website.
If your server is not operational and available for some reason then your website is not displayed at that point in time.
If a user is searching for your website at that specific time and if they can’t land on your website, that’s going to obviously create a negative impression.
The user will bounce back and look for other results on the topic.
Hence, the web host is important for uptime and this is one of the best benefits of web hosting.
3. Professional email address associated with the domain.
If you are reading about the benefits of web hosting you either have a website or looking to create one.
In that case, kudos to you.
But.
Having a website comes with it like professionalism.
With having web hosting you will get professional-looking email addresses.
When maintaining a website you will have to deal with customers and clients through email and if you want to appear more professional and trustworthy other than the website you should go for these professional email addresses.
It appears like this.
Name@yourdomain.com, unlike Name@gmail.com
This is another benefit of web hosting.
Almost every web hosting service includes these professional-looking email addresses in their plan.
4. Easy data recovery of your website.
If in case anything happens with your websites like a hack or some other error and your website goes down.
Your all data would most probably be lost unless you have not taken a manual backup of it, which most people ignore.
This happened to me once,
But what’s interesting is having a web hosting service for your website helps you by taking regular backups of your website.
Even if in case of some malware or due to some wrong technical information, if you mess things up on your website.
You can still restore the data from the backups of the host which happens automatically without the interference of you.
So that your asset is not gone.
This is a second option for you like if even though you installed some backup plugin on your host and taking plugins regularly and in case if you failed to take the backup of it on that day.
Don’t worry, your host is there for you to restore your data including your text, images, files, plugins, videos back to normal.
5. Flexibility to upgrade is easy.
Now that you have chosen a web host of quality looking at its reviews which we will later talk in this blog.
If your website is falling short of the existing resources provided in your plan or you have added new features in your blog or want to move to the higher server and hosting which I mentioned earlier like.
- A VPS or a dedicated hosting server.
You can do it easily without much hurdles and hassles anytime.
Now that you have understood why web hosting is important and the benefits of web hosting services.
Let’s understand is its only choice you have to consider buying for web hosting or can’t we get it for free.
There are many other benefits of web hosting and starting a website as a whole, click here to learn more.
Is buying the web hosting the only choice you have for your website?
No, absolutely not.
You can get web hosting for free as well.
You can create your own server if you do not want a free one.
Let’s understand both.
Firstly,
Web hosting for free!
There are many companies which offer web hosting for free, here are few
- Blogger.
- Wix.
- Weebly.
- Tumblr.
- Contentful.
There are many other companies which offer free hosting and domain name associated with their brand name.
Does that mean, you should probably choose their hosting instead of buying for web hosting service?
Let’s find out that.
Remember, the following names of the companies I have mentioned are offering to host your website for FREE.
For example, you have chosen Wix or blogger as your blogging platform because of free hosting and domain name, then what?
There are 13 things you need to consider, they are
- Your website is completely under your hosting company’s control.
- Your website loading speed is shitty.
- You can’t customize your website like a professional one.
- SEO on your site will be extremely difficult.
- Limitations and restrictions are always there to hold you back.
- Your blog’s credibility is at stake.
- It costs you a lot to upgrade in free platforms like Wix considering with other paid web hosting plans for WordPress.
- It does not matter how good your content be, you will rarely rank and others will barely link to you.
- There is no use of having a custom domain on this free hosting platforms.
- You can’t think of monetization of your blog other than AdSense or ads.
- There is no guarantee of your website’s safety and security, if you violate the t&c of the company, your site might get deleted.
- You will face issues in moving your free blog to paid one on WordPress because of flexibility.
- Above all, you are not fully committed.
Now that you know why you should not go for free hosting service,
If you still want to go for these free hosting services, you can go for it.
- Blogger, which is an official google blogging platform.
- Wix.
- Weebly.
- Tumblr.
- Joomla.
In fact, I have my first website hosted on blogger, I would recommend a blogger for you if you want to just try out things.
Learn more about things, click here.
What about hosting your website on your own?
Yes, you heard it right.
You can create your own server and host your blogs on there.
In case if you want to host your blog on your own server.
You need to have things in place accordingly.
Here are the following things you need to set up your own server.
- A powerful computer.
- A good processor with a lot of RAM.
- An operating system like Linux and windows.
- A lot of technical knowledge and skill.
- 24/7 monitoring of your server for any threats, stuff.
- High-speed internet connection.
- Maintenance and repair of servers.
If you do not want to get into hassles and hurdles of servers and technical stuff but want a web hosting for your website, you have no other option than paying for web hosting services.
13 things to consider while choosing a host for your website?
Here are 13 things you need to keep in mind before partnering with web hosting providers for your website.
- What is the storage space of the hosting service?
- What is the uptime of their server, do they ensure a 99.9% uptime guarantee?
- Look at their customer reviews.
- Research about how many customers your hosting service has served to, and how many countries they are present in?
- Know the location of servers and data centers of their hosts.
- Look at their customer support both availability and accessibility aspects.
- Look at what else they offer for free in the plan you choose like free domain, SSL, free backups, caching, CDN, email accounts, etc.
- Learn about the hosting’s server response time in Google.
- Know if the host is optimized for WordPress.
- Look at their pricing and their hosting type.
- Analyze how old they have been in the industry?
- What is your website traffic?
- What type of website you own or thinking of having like an e-commerce site or business blog or just a website/blog?
Best web hosting providers for different types of hosts:
Now that you know what things to look for in web hosting services, here are few hosting services you can go for which are good fits of the factors I mentioned earlier.
- For shared hosting and for beginners on website and blogging, Bluehost is the place to go for.
- For VPS hosting accuweb hosting is the place to go for.
- For WordPress hosting, Wpengine and Bluehost are perfect places to go for.
- For dedicated hosting, Hostgator is the address.
- For cloud hosting and best customer service and speed, Siteground is the address.
- For reseller hosting and fast reliable shared one, A2 hosting is the address you should partner with.
- For cheap prices with good uptime and speed, Hostinger is the place to go for.
Well, I got Bluehost shared hosting plan on my website, here is this website loading speed on Google page speed insights. and GTmetrix.
Now that you have a good understanding of Web hosting.
Let’s answer 3 of the most commonly asked questions related to the topic of Web hosting.
Let’s dive right in.
FAQS:
1. What are the disadvantages of web hosting services?
Ans: Well the disadvantages are pretty normal.
- Inability to customize the hosting service.
- Expensive prices as you upgrade in your hosting service.
- Placing too many websites on a single server in shared hosting which will affect your site’s performance.
2. Does hosting affect your SEO?
Ans: Absolutely yes.
Remember I have spoken about the performance of a website where I have talked about the speed and uptime of the website.
These 2 factors are extremely important for SEO.
Here is the deal, you have to host for your website, your website ranked for some query in google and your website is down at that time.
Now what?
Whoever clicks on your website, finds your website is down, they will bounce back and that gives a sign to Google that your result is not a good fit for that term.
Google will downrank you.
Same with the speed of the website, the longer your website takes to load the higher your bounce rate gets.
In fact, there are very rare circumstances, that Google officially accepted that website loading speed is their top ranking factor.
3. Does Google favor WordPress?
Ans: No absolutely not.
Google does not rank sites on the basis of the cms of the website.
Of course, WordPress is SEO friendly because the themes are light and easy to understand, the content is easy to digest for google.
Having WordPress.org as your CMS makes SEO easy that doesn’t mean you will have an extra advantage over your competitors and rank well on google because you built site on WordPress.
Google ranks website’s on 200 different factors,
Some of the most important factors are.
- Search intent.
- Quality content.
- Quality backlinks.
- User experience.
- CTR.
- The loading speed of the website.
- Site structure, and linking both internal and external.
These are the 3 most frequently asked questions by people regarding the web hosting topic.
Feel free, to comment down your any other questions I would have missed, I will answer them as well.
Ending remarks:
There you go, I have answered all the queries related to web hosting and the benefits of web hosting.
Do let me know in the comments section what do you think of the blog.
Which hosting type you are going to buy and of which provider in the comment section.
If you liked this blog, you will most probably like our other blogs,
Make sure to check out the following blogs as well.
- Pros and cons of SEO:
- Blog vs vlog, the debate is over.
- 13 reasons to start a blog in 2020.
- 31 blogging mistakes to avoid in 2020.
- Why blogs are important for SEO and business.
Please share the blog with your family, friends who are looking at buying a web host.
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I will catch you next time, till then.
Keep learning & keep growing.