How To Choose The Best Hosting Service And Website Builder
Hosting is the hardware that powers your website and makes it available to visitors worldwide. This is where you store your website’s files and content and where visitors access your site (by typing in your domain name). Every single website has some type of web hosting behind it, whether it’s a big website like YouTube or a personal blog.
What is Hosting?
Hosting is the act of allocating space on a web server for a website to store its files. Hosting makes websites’ files (code, images, etc.) available online for viewing. A server hosts every website you’ve ever visited. Hosting determines how much space a website has on a server. The most common hosting types are shared, dedicated, virtual private servers, and reseller plans. Their differences are based on the server technology, the managerial level, and the added services they provide.
Recommended Website Builders & Hosting Services
These are some of the most recommended website builders with hosting:
Free Hosting or Paid Subscriptions. Which is Better?
Price is always an important factor when choosing a web hosting service or website builder, and you will see that the prices vary greatly.
You should test the free hosting services each one of the packages includes, how user-friendly their interface is if they offer 24/7 support, and how customizable their templates are.
For instance, the domain name, hosting services, & range of design templates are usually limited with free hosting and website builders. Premium services offer a variety of marketing tools that will help you boost your site’s online visibility and organic traffic. You should probably not be using free web hosting or website builders as it only offers a subdomain, inserting the website builder brand’s name as part of your site address – an important aspect if you want to optimize your website for the search engines.
When using a free hosting service or website building tool for site creation, your site will always display the builder’s ads. While in some cases they are barely visible, in others they will catch the visitors’ eye, and distract them from your website’s content. Moreover, it is very difficult to monetize using a free web hosting tool as you don’t have the option of inserting your own advertising code.
Why pay for web hosting?
Uptime (reliability)
Both free and paid services should be reliable, but you should only expect real reliability with a paid hosting plan. Having a web host with reliable servers and stable network connections is essential if you want your website to operate 24/7.
Traffic/Bandwidth
Choose an appropriate plan based on the limitations on your bandwidth usage. You want a plan that matches your needs if you will be incorporating video, audio, or other elements that require a higher level of bandwidth.
Control Panel
Using a control panel, you can manage various aspects of your website hosting account. From a commercial host, you should expect a control panel that allows you to perform everyday maintenance tasks without having to call technical support. Using a ‘cPanel’, you can manage email addresses, passwords, and basic server configurations.
Cost
You often get what you pay for when it comes to web hosting. The cost of shared hosting will vary from $10 to $150 per year if you have a basic website without a lot of traffic. Hosts with higher capacities can start at $150 and rise from there.
Types of web hosting
Various types of web hosting have evolved over time to meet the needs of different types of websites and customers. Among them are:
- Shared Web Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Cloud Reseller
Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting refers to hosting a website on the same server as a number of other websites. Shared hosting is offered by most web hosting companies. Because it’s easy to set up and cheap, it’s a good choice for new sites that won’t get a lot of traffic immediately. Small and medium businesses, as well as individuals, can benefit from it.
VPS Hosting
Virtual private servers (VPS) are also known as virtual dedicated servers (VDS), and are used for running multiple websites from the same server. VPS-style hosting is therefore considered to be a stepping stone between shared hosting and owning a dedicated machine. VPS hosting is more like dedicated hosting in that clients have full control over the configuration of the VPS.
Dedicated Hosting
An entire server is rented through dedicated hosting (also called managed hosting or a dedicated server). There is more to dedicated hosting than providing a single website with all server equipment housed in a data center. The system provides greater self-service options for server administration. In this case, you have total control over the server, its software, and its security.
Cloud Hosting
In recent years, cloud hosting has become extremely popular on the market. An affordable, scalable and reliable web infrastructure is provided by a network of interconnected web servers. This is why so many large businesses are turning to cloud hosting, which typically offers unmetered, reliable bandwidth and an unlimited amount of disk space.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting enables account owners to host websites for third parties using their allocated hard drive space and bandwidth. ‘Reseller’ in this case refers to the original hosting account owner. It is beneficial to use reseller hosting when the amount of space purchased is not required, and some of the allocated resources can be shared. Get recurring income while sharing disk space, bandwidth, and CPU.
Conclusion
With such a wide range of website hosting services available, choosing the right one for your site is no easy task. The best approach to deciding which website builder is the right one for you is to read the reviews and compare the prices and the services included in the package in order to make an informed decision.