When it comes to owning a business, you need a website. With the amount of people on the internet every day, businesses without a website will struggle more to expand and acquire more customers outside of their area. Say for example you own a restaurant. If you do not own a website, search engines such as Google will struggle to show users your restaurant when searching something like “restaurants near me”. It will show all your competitors but fail to show yours. No website means less customers which means less money. Your first steps will to first acquire a domain name and then find somewhere to host your website.
A web host is someone or some company that owns or rents servers that will hold your website’s files. You may wonder why not just host it yourself. Self-hosting is rather expensive and often not worth it for most people. Web hosting offers many services such as storage, email, data transfers, etc. Before you start looking into options for web hosting, you must first determine the uses of your website. Along with many different web hosting companies, each offer a variety of deals on hosting plans. Some include shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, etc. If it is just a small blog, then you will want to go with the shared hosting. Shared hosting is often the cheapest option. If you have a large company with many customers, then you might want a dedicated hosting plan. This means that your website is hosted on a dedicated server where all the resources are allocated to your website. Let’s look further into some of the options to get a better idea of what they have to offer.
Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting means your website shares a server with other websites. The advantage of shared hosting is that it is cheap and usually costs less than $10 a month. However, problems arise when one site on the server begins to use up a large amount of resources. That will cause all the other websites on the server to perform worse.
VPS Web Hosting
With VPS hosting, multiple sites are on the same server, but there are less websites per sever compared to shared hosting and each site has dedicated resources to it. If one website one the server receives a large amount of traffic, it will not affect the performance of other websites. In return, VPS hosting costs more usually being between $20 - $60.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated hosting is the most expensive option. Only websites that need a large amount of server resources should think about this option. Your website will be the only site on a single server. Which means the only limitation on resources is the amount the server offers.