What is hosting?
Hosting is a space within a server in which the files that make up your website or blog are stored or posted, within the hosting there are different applications for your website to work by interpreting and ordering the code that is in the files in what we see as text and images.
Basically explained, hosting is the box in which your website is placed so that it can be accessed through the internet.
The question that I have been asked the most in my life and I know how to answer it for all ages: “the house where your website lives on the internet” I answered a 4-year-old girl one day and that’s how I normally tell it, it’s worth developing it…
To hosting It is also called web hosting, so I make the analogies with houses , it matters more to me that you understand the concept than that you learn the definition by heart.
There is a lot of hosting on offer , from free hosting to hosting with prohibitive prices, but what abounds the most are poor quality hosting providers, so you must take this decision very seriously since it is an economic investment and it affects your blog, what is cheap is expensive and you put a lot of effort into your work.
What types of hosting or web hosting exist?
There are different types of hosting depending on the type of server and the distribution made by the provider of space and resources.
Servers are huge computers that continuously execute the requests they receive from the client side. They are very powerful machines and the more capacity, technology and maintenance they have, the quality of service will be much better.
The performance of your hosting greatly affects the loading speed of your blog, so you must be clear that quality hosting is a very important bet to make your blog work much better.
the needs of each one , the normal thing is to choose the option that best suits your needs, in this case I am going to speak to you from the voice of experience.
There are different classifications but the ones we will talk about are those within shared hosting, which is the most common and the one that best suits the needs of bloggers. We will not talk about dedicated hosting because it is a fabulous option but for huge projects.
What is shared hosting:
Shared hosting is the cheapest option for blogs and small websites, although there are several price ranges depending on the size and traffic for individual options, it is the best. This is the normal hosting of a lifetime.
Shared hosting has many advantages:
- They are highly optimized commercial packages for everyday use.
- Simple and intuitive administration panels.
- They usually have a good technical service specialized in dealing with the “small customer”.
- They are cheaper accommodation.
Shared hosting also has disadvantages:
- Sometimes they don’t handle large amounts of traffic well.
- You can have hosting neighbors with low Ip or spammers that make that container be considered as low quality…
- It is easy to make a mistake and hire poor quality or insufficient hosting.
- It is also that sometimes we do not see the small print, for example: they only allow us an email account, a database, they do not allow us to make subdomains…
Although you can normally extend the conditions, from experience I can tell you that not everyone has customer service, but rather uses an assistant or ticket systems that are very practical for very technical queries but for someone who is just starting out and does not have average knowledge of “the webmaster dialect» can have a hard time, so I leave you with 4 recommendations that have good attention.
Where to hire shared hosting services:
VPS.
It is your own container in which you can make the partitions and distribute the resources as you want.
It seems to me a way to save money since I can host about 10-20 websites for the price of 5 in a good quality shared hosting, it is an investment but, in my case, I pay it off, this is recommended for people who have several blogs on WordPress or who want to host small communities.
Advantages of a VPS server:
- Being able to have unlimited subdomains and databases, email accounts as well.
- Being able to give the space you want depending on how the project grows, just like I have blogs that are dinosaurs, I have very light websites or very basic landing pages, the sheep that enter through the ones that leave.
- Another advantage of VPS is that you can have a fixed IP, this is ideal for SEO and in my case, I have a Spanish IP because I have no intention of writing in German or English, it’s a bit of a joke but it helps me to position myself in Spain. It is where more traffic comes from and it comes in handy for local projects in which geolocation is very important, obviously you receive traffic from the rest of the world, but you have a few more points of local positioning and proximity.
- You can work to “model” quality hosting and even sell hosting to other sites.
Disadvantages of a VPS server:
- It is a much more complicated panel, in my case I use Plesk panel (I love it) and I have to create my hosting within my own container, although the company with which I have the hosting does continuous maintenance updates, I have to take care of everything works on my domains and play house by enlarging, trimming, managing…
- You need knowledge of average web mastering to be able to get the most out of it, although these things are like the brain, if we get 10% out of it, it’s tremendous.
It is true it is an investment, although I got an offer like this at 50% and it came in handy: Managed SSD VPS Server from €14.38/ Month. Support and migration included. Spanish IP and Plesk 12. It is the hosting in which this blog runs, if you contract it annually you save more than if you only get the discount for the first 3 or 6 months…. And you can see it.
The choice of a good hosting is something fundamental, although it seems something without much importance, nothing further: many factors depend on the quality of your hosting that will affect your blog or website, such as loading speed, availability, SEO or even its size.
There are dedicated servers that this is the most pro-option but they are much more expensive and are indicated for huge volumes.
Cloud-hosting
This is the future or so they say, they are servers in the virtual cloud through several physical machines so it is much faster to serve both the web and files and data, this type of server is ideal for remote applications. It is very scalable and easy to learn, the disadvantage is its price, although shared is cheaper.
Specialized or technical hosting:
This type of hosting is usually the one that is directly associated with a CMS or web application such as Joomla, WordPress, Prestation or Magento to give examples.
They are designed to offer a complete package of functionalities, specialized technical support and adequate capacity for the application , for which they are highly recommended products; In the case of Magento (ecommerce) which, due to the amount of resources it consumes, can suck the life out of you, in this type of hosting it is highly optimized.
This type of hosting solves many technical problems of installation and development (in a blog it is not noticeable) you take away the bad part of the middle and move on to the beautiful part that is the content although the price is higher, but the technical problems are minors.
I blog is hosted on Alarmed.
Free hosting:
This modality is very popular, although they are usually very limited hosting programs, in which many services do not exist, they are very useful to save money or to carry out small experiments without taking financial risks.
I use them a lot for tests and experiments so as not to harm the websites that I have hosted on my server. If you are interested in knowing more about free hosting in my other blog Negocioscaninos I have a very interesting post about free hosting providers , there I talk a little more about benefits and about pros and cons, it can come in handy.
Among the providers there are some that are worthwhile, although they do not even come close to the benefits and stability of a paid one because they use older machines, they do not carry out as much maintenance but to have a blog posted as a hobby they can be interesting.
