Most Commonly Asked Questions About Website Hosting

Looking to get started with web hosting, but not sure where to begin? We’ve got you covered! In addition to our comprehensive reviews, we’ve compiled answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about hosting a website to help you get started.

What Is Web Hosting?

Web hosting services, at the most basic level, provide the portal between your business and your website or applications on the Internet. They essentially have servers and management software that lets you design, upload, and link your website and component web pages together, and place them out before the world. In turn, they make sure it is accessible via the web address you’ve registered so that people can access it.  

Often, the best web hosting companies also provide a suite of tools and software to help you track statistics about your site, optimize search results and ranking among search engines, and other value-added features. Some also offer assistance and tools to create your website in the first place, whereas others are purely a hosting platform.  

How Can I Benefit From Web Hosting?

Naturally, in order to have an online presence, you need web hosting. While larger corporations can often have the resources and abilities to handle this in-house, the vast majority of individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses need services from an outside company. The top web hosting providers employ skilled in-house personnel to monitor servers and troubleshoot problems, 24/7. Their goal is to make it easy for you to get yourself and your business online, with tools and services to help you present your best face to the digital world. They handle the tech side of hosting and let you focus on running your business – not learning a second career in networking and Internet technology.  

What Web Hosting Features Do You Need?

There are many different features available from many of the best web hosting companies we’ve highlighted in this guide. The most basic, affordable plans are often the least feature-rich, though they do provide the basics that you need to get your site online.  Website builder packages, or those with drag-and-drop software capabilities, tend to cost a bit more at a lot of hosts, though many of the best top web hosting providers may include them for free. Support is also critical – 24/7 support, either by phone, live chat, or both – is pretty much the standard for the top web hosting providers today.  This will help ensure your website is up, running, and accessible all of the time, and that you have someone to turn to for help ASAP if there are any issues.

Can You Get Web Hosting for Free?

Some companies, particularly those that focus on providing simple website builder software experiences, often provide hosting services for those same sites. They’re managed and limited compared to what you might find at other hosts, of course, especially for the free or ad-supported plans.  

But if you have no budget for hosting, check out a company like Wix or Weebly and see what they offer – you can get very basic web design and hosting for free! For more demanding applications and needs, though, you’ll need a paid plan from a top web hosting company – remember, you get what you pay for!

What Hosting Options Are There?

As mentioned earlier, there are a few different key types of web hosting options.  Depending on your particular needs, one option may be more appealing over the other.  Just remember that they all come at different price points, and with different levels of features, so be sure to do your research on what you need, and don’t go overboard if you’re just starting out with a small, simple website!

• Website builder accounts: The aforementioned drag-and-drop style simple interface systems that also handle technical things like web hosting.  Options and features are limited, but for a personal site or a start-up business, this can be a great low-cost choice.
• Shared web hosting: The most common type of entry-level hosting that most services offer. Multiple websites from different customers are hosted on a single server.  This is a cost-effective solution, though there may be some performance issues as you are sharing system resources with other clients.
• Dedicated web hosting: Provides your business with a dedicated, single server, not shared with anyone else.  This is incredibly valuable for high-bandwidth, high-performance, and/or high-security applications and needs.  Of course, it costs a bit more since you are paying for the server alone.
• VPS: Virtual Private Server web hosting is a bit of middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting.  While the hardware remains shared physically, you get a dedicated partition on the server, with a set share of system resources as part of your service agreement.  This can help ensure performance is maintained, without requiring a dedicated server for just your business.
• Cloud hosting: It has become increasingly popular, especially for larger or high-demand sites.  Hosting functions are spread across groups of computers in the host’s data centers, and can respond on-demand to traffic and computational needs, scaling up or down as required.
• Personal hosting: Where you use your own computer or a spare computer to host a site out of your home or office.  This is not advisable, however, as it may violate your ISP agreements, and will generally require much greater technical expertise than any other option here.  It also results in poor performance, limited features and abilities, and can be a real headache unless you know exactly what you are doing.