What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is just a place on the internet that holds your website. It’s a computer called a server that is always on and always connected to the internet.
It holds all of the files and software that make up your website. When someone types your website into their browser, they see your website because the server is showing them the proper files.
What makes one web hosting service better than another?
There are many things to take into account when choosing a web hosting company. Some of the more important ones are speed, reliability, bandwidth and disk space, Managed WordPress Hosting, support, scaleability, and price.
Web hosting speed
Your web hosting service needs to be fast so that your website visitors don’t have to wait around to see your website. Some web hosts show your website much faster than others.
Generally speaking, if your website displays in less than one second, everything is ok. If it takes between 1 and 2 seconds, it’s below average and Google will penalize you for it by not showing your website among the top search results. When it takes over 3 seconds to display your website, people tend to click away and look elsewhere.
Reliability (uptime of 99.99%)
A web hosting provider’s service can be interrupted for a number of reasons, and when it does, your website will not be available. Some issues that arise are servers or other hardware failing, software glitches or servers that need to be shut down momentarily for maintenance. Good web hosts have backup systems to minimize downtime.
An uptime of 99% sounds good, but it’s not. It means that the service can be down 1% of the time. That means that your website won’t be available for up to 7 hours per month.
An uptime of 99.9% translates into up to 43 minutes of downtime per month. Still not very good.
We recommend that you choose a web host that has a 4 nines uptime (99.99%) or better. That translates into a maximum of about 4 minutes per month of downtime.
5 nines (99.999%) and better is available but it starts getting very pricey. Going for zero downtime probably isn’t realistic unless your website is getting millions of views and you can afford to pay for it.
Bandwidth and Disk Storage Space
Bandwidth is the amount of gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB, equals 1000 GB) that your website uses every month to transfer data in and out of your website. It’s a lot like the bandwidth limit that your cell phone service provider sets. If you’ve been watching movies on your phone using data instead of wifi, you know that it can add up and that might reach your limit before the end of the month. Website bandwidth works in a similar manner.
When you start out, your website will most likely need less than 1 GB bandwidth per month. When it starts getting more traffic, it will might get up to 10 GB bandwidth per month. When you are getting about 30,000 visitors per month, your website will probably need somewhere between 250 GB to 500 GB of monthly bandwidth.
Disk space is the amount of space that you have available on the server for your website files. When you start out, your website will probably need less than 1 GB, even with about 100 photos.
Most web hosts offer more than what you need to get started. Some offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, which in most cases is not really unlimited (you will need to read the fine print). We prefer that the bandwidth and storage space be clearly stated by the web host provider.
LiquidWeb currently offers 2 TB monthly bandwidth and 15 GB storage which is enough for a website with a ton of traffic.
Managed WordPress Hosting
There is Regular Hosting and there is what is called Managed WordPress Hosting. You can get by with Regular Hosting, but its usually worth paying a few extra dollars per month for Managed WordPress Hosting.
Many hosts include daily backups of your website, plugin updates and WordPress updates in their Managed WordPress Hosting packages. All of this can be done manually, but its much easier and more reliable to have it done automatically.
Support
Being able to get quick and detailed answers to your questions is obviously important. The support that different web hosts provide varies in quality and price. Most provide free support, although some web hosts actually charge you extra for support.
Scaleability
Once your website has grown and is getting lots of traffic, it will eventually outgrow its hosting plan. Being with a host that has other bigger plans that you can upgrade to makes growth a whole lot easier. If they don’t, you will need to move your website to a different host and that can be a time consuming hassle.
Affordable price
A lot of web hosts advertise very enticing pricing to get you to sign up, but charge you a much higher price when its time to renew.
Another tactic that is often used is to give you the bare basics and charge you for every additional service or feature. Some of the common features that they often do this with are domain privacy, SSL certificate, back-ups, Managed WordPress Hosting and more.
They might offer basic hosting for $3 a month, but charge you a few dollars for each additional feature. Once you add them up, you can easily be paying $15 a month. When renewal time comes around, your monthly hosting fee can easily jump up to $25.
How can you avoid this? Go with a hosting company that includes all the features that you want and that clearly states how much the renewal price will be.