What is Web Hosting
For your website to work, you need a place to keep your website’s files, and you need a way for people to download and view those files.
This is what a server does. A server is a specialized computer that stores (hosts) your website’s files and sends (serves) them to people who visit your site.
A web hosting service is a company that manages servers. When you sign up for a hosting plan, you are paying them for the right to use one of their machines. You are also paying for the benefit of having professionals take care of the computer that holds all of your valuable website files.
Top Host Providers
If you need powerful, flexible web hosting, these top-ranking providers will get the job done. With so many hosting companies offering extensive hosting packages, including site builder tools, domains, speed, and disk space, making the right web hosting decision can be a challenge.
Having reviewed all the big players in the hosting industry, our expert team have come up with this definitive list. Choose your favorite & launch your project today!
Features:
- Decent performance
- Easy-to-use website builder
- cPanel-powered Linux hosting
The largest domain registrar in the world, and one of the best provider of services that enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence.
They provide a variety of domain name registration plans and Web site design and hosting packages, as well as an extensive bundle of on-demand services. These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce Web site hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting.
Kinds of web hosting service they offer:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- WordPress hosting
Features:
- Easy to use
- Powerful and feature-packed
- Automated setup for WordPress
The most affordable WordPress hosting.
WordPress hosting plans are generally more costly, but there are discounted introductory rates available. With those, you get automated setup for WordPress, as well as other popular apps.
With BlueHost you can depend on: Highest customer service; Quality equipment; Maximum guaranteed uptime; Highly functional tools for administration and secure and reliable backups.
You can chat online or over the phone round-the-clock. This makes for a powerful, feature-packed, user-friendly web hosting – with customization options for the more demanding user.
Kinds of web hosting service they offer:
- Shared hosting.
- VPS hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting.
- Dedicated hosting.
- Cloud hosting
Features:
- Great basic plan
- No limits or restrictions
- 45-day money-back guarantee
Hostgator has been a established hosting solution for a long time. Millions of businesses and bloggers trust HostGator to provide web hosting for all levels of business.
They promise cheap plans, strong uptime, and generous money-back guarantee.
Additionally, all plans include a website builder with templates, unlimited bandwidth, and $100 in AdWords credits to help you optimize your WordPress SEO. Furthermore, HostGator offers amazing 24/7 support.
Kinds of web hosting service they offer:
- Shared hosting.
- VPS hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting.
- Dedicated hosting.
- Cloud hosting
Features:
- Easy & Fast
- Suitable for All Users
- Prefered by Designers & Agencies
SiteGround is an outstanding, and reliable cheap web hosting service provider that has been around since 2004. Hosts over a million domains globally, and it’s one of the most beginner-friendly web hosting platforms.
The company is widely known for its highly secure environment, industry-leading speed and stable support.
Moreover, SiteGround provides freebies that include free setup, free domains, daily backups, limitless bandwidth and emails, free website migration, and free CloudFlare CDN
Kinds of web hosting service they offer:
- Shared hosting.
- VPS hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting.
- Dedicated hosting.
- Cloud hosting
Features:
- Fast and friendly service with different levels of support
- Relatively cheap hosting for a green service
- Offers excellent security
The greenest hosting company on this list is GreenGeeks.
Servers use up a lot of energy and it’s good to see a company that is truly concerned about the environment. They give back 300% the power they consume into the grid in the form of renewable energy.
Their SSD storage makes them one of the fastest WordPress hosting providers that also delivers on security and reliability. Also, they offer feature-rich, reliable, and scalable hosting that comes with 24/7 support and 99.9% uptime.
Kinds of web hosting service they offer:
- Shared hosting.
- VPS hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting.
- Dedicated hosting.
- Cloud hosting
Webhosts Speed compared
GoDaddy – global average 171.1 ms
SiteGround – global average 136.9 ms
BlueHost – global average 153.0 ms
HostGator – global average 191.0 ms
GreenGeeks – global average 118.6 ms
Shared hosting vs VPS or Dedicated IP
In general, there are three kinds of hosting: shared, dedicated, and VPS.
You should know heading in to this section that shared hosting is probably going to be your best choice. Most beginners will never need dedicated or VPS services, but it’s still good to understand how they work.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting means that you share a server with other customers. One server is split up into a bunch of virtual partitions, with each hosting account being assigned to a particular partition.
Shared hosting plans are cheap (starting at around a few dollars a month) and easy to use. Most shared hosting plans are very full-featured and allow you to host unlimited websites.
The biggest issue with shared hosting is the “shared” part. Since you’re splitting server resources with other customers, your site’s performance can vary due to activity of other sites on your server. If a site from a different account experiences a sudden spike in traffic, you might notice slower page loads for a short period of time.
Most hosting companies have countermeasures in place that prevent any one user from hogging all the resources, but it may still be an occasional issue.
Additionally, if your site begins receiving tens of thousands of visitors a day, then you may begin to run into some problems on a shared hosting plan. It’s usually easy to upgrade, so this isn’t something you should worry about.
For 90% of websites, shared hosting will be more than sufficient.
Dedicated hosting
With dedicated hosting, you are essentially leasing an entire server from the hosting company. Nobody else will be allowed to use your machine. Your website will load extremely quickly at all times, and unless you are receiving insane amounts of traffic, you’ll never have to worry about performance. You’ll also have the ability to make all sorts of tweaks to how the hardware runs, and you’ll be able to install custom software.
Dedicated servers are good for large companies, high-traffic websites, and complex web applications that need a lot of processing power.
Dedicating hosting is expensive, with most plans starting at around $140/month, and there’s a lot more you need to know about hosting when you’re in charge of your own server. There’s very little chance you’ll need dedicated hosting for your first site.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A virtual private server is sort of a halfway point between shared and dedicated hosting.
Virtual private servers are created by dividing a single server into a small number of “virtual machines”. These virtual machines behave like individual computers. They have their own memory, operating systems, etc. Even though they all run on a single physical machine, they’re don’t affect one another.
VPS servers are split among a very small number of customers. Shared hosting servers will usually have a much larger number of users on the same machine.
As with dedicated servers, VPS hosting is not necessary for the majority of new websites.
2 Things You Need in From your Website host; Performance, and Customer Service
Shopping for a web host can be overwhelming. The Internet is littered with hundreds of providers who all seem to be offering the same product at the same price.
The truth is that is that web hosting costs are about the same no matter where you look, so it’s most important to consider Performance and Customer Service when evaluating a hosting service.
There are lots of review sites for hosting companies, but many of these are just fronts for people trying to make affiliate sales.
We think the best and most honest advice comes from forums, so we highly recommend you spend some time browsing sites like DigitalPoint or WarriorForum where you’ll find mostly unbiased opinions on hosting providers.
Host your WordPress Site on GreenGeeks
WordPress is an extremely popular content management system. A content management system (CMS) is a framework that makes it easy for webmasters to add, edit, and remove website content.
WordPress is used by tens of millions of websites. It’s free, easy to use, and highly customizable. While WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, it’s so powerful and flexible that countless non-blog sites use it as well.
If you want to learn more about how to build a WordPress website on your new hosting package, I suggest checking out Digitellus’ HOW TO SET UP A WORDPRESS WEBSITE, which contains detailed instructions on installing and configuring WordPress.
