Cloud Hosting

Just as a business needs an office, a website needs web hosting in order to run smoothly on the internet. But what is web hosting? And how do you choose the best web hosting service for your business?

Web hosting is a paid service that provides you with the resources needed to run your website. Depending on your hosting plan, you are given access to a certain amount of resourcessuch as storage space and network bandwidthon one or more physical servers owned by the web hosting provider.

There is a wide range of web hosting services available in the market, each with its own collection of free and paid plans to choose from. Depending on your websites technical requirements and your own personal know-how, you can opt for any of these plans to access the resources needed to run your website.

In this article, we'll walk you through everything you need to know in order to choose the right web hosting provider for your website.

A website needs resources to stay online. These resources include such things as storage space for the sites content, and network bandwidth to let visitors smoothly access it. While the storage makes sure that you have enough space to store all your sites files, bandwidth is the capacity of data that can be transferred between the website and its users.

The resources are obtained from a serverwhich is really just a powerful computer thats connected to the internet at all times.Typically, a web hosting provider will have a large number of servers spread across one or more remote data centers. Depending on the plan you go for, the provider will allocate a set amount of resources on these servers for your website to use.

A question that a lot of budding website owners seem to ask is whether they should invest in a paid web hosting provider, or just choose a free one. Free web hosting services are indeed available, but they are limited in nature and often come with certain strings attached.

Mostly, they are a way for a web hosting provider to advertise their more powerful paid hosting plans. For example, free web hosting will often limit the amount of storage space you can use or the number of visitors who can access your website in a given month. Services may even display intrusive advertisements on your website.

These things can greatly impact the functioning of a professional site, which is why free hosting is only recommended when you are working on a personal project with no financial implications. If, however, you are using your website for professional or business purposes, a paid hosting plan is a must-have.

There are different types of web hosting services available in the market. They differ in aspects such as server speed, disk space, network bandwidth, and various secondary features. Depending on your specific circumstances, you can choose a plan with the resources that fit your needs and budget. Below are a few common forms of web hosting.

There are several tens, if not hundreds, of web hosting providers vying for space in the website industry. Because of the sheer number of options available, choosing the right hosting provider can prove quite challenging. We outline our top picks in our guide to the best web hosting services available, but here's a summary of the top web hosts in the market right now to make your search a little easier.

Based in Europe with more than 30 million users, Hostinger provides powerful yet affordable web hosting options across different price ranges. It has data centers in the USA, UK, Singapore, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. Hostinger also offers one of the most reasonable cloud hosting plans in the market. Learn more about the company in our comprehensive Hostinger review.

Bluehost is based in the USA, and is almost two decades old. It currently supports over two million websites online. Bluehost offers a range of shared, virtual, and dedicated hosting services with one-click installation options for content management systems like WordPress. It is also known for excellent customer support, and its site migration tool is very easy to use. You can find out more about this service in our full Bluehost review.

HostGator offers superb shared hosting plans at attractive prices. Theres a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 customer support. All plans come with unmetered bandwidth. Theres a 45-day money-back guarantee and a free domain and SSL certificate included with each plan. Our HostGator review discusses the service and its features in more detail.

Generally speaking, the three things to look out for in any great web hosting providerapart from storage and bandwidthare server speeds, uptime guarantees, and customer support.

A good web host will always offer great speeds and reliable uptime, along with dedicated round-the-clock customer support. You should generally look for at least 99.9% uptime and 24/7 customer support from all hosting providers.

When choosing the right web hosting provider and plan, you have to keep in mind both short-term functioning and long-term scalability. Some hosting providers are easier to upgrade and transfer out of than others. Some even offer dedicated upgrade options and website migration tools.

However, no one web hosting company will be able to offer you a great deal in all these aspects, especially if you have budget constraints. This is where you will have to prioritize based on your businesss needs. As long as you stick to a reputable provider, however, you shouldnt run into any issues.

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What is web hosting? What you need to know to choose the right provider - ITProPortal