Web hosting may be the internet's most underappreciated
element. Everything you love about being online—podcasts, memes, articles,
tweets, websites, online gaming, Netflix content—lives on a server that an
individual or company pays to keep up and running so that you can access it. In
short, web hosting is an invisible, essential element of the online experience.
If you're considering, say, launching a website, there are
several basic web hosting aspects that you should be familiar with before
starting the project. Although it's relatively easy to sign up and use a
provider's supplied website-building software to swiftly create an attractive,
functional front end, there are a lot of related terms and concepts to wrap
your head around. As you'll soon see, some of it is confusing, if not outright
contradictory. Here's what you need to know about web hosting before opening an
account.
1. There's a Big Difference Between Hosting Types
If you've spent any amount of time on a web host's website,
you've probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and
reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web
host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in
significant ways.
Nearly every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest
form of web hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and
server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting
budget small, and don't expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go.
You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting type.
This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don't need a
huge amount of bandwidth, however. Since you're sharing resources with other
sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your
site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors. Free web hosting is available if
you're on a tight budget, but it comes with its own caveats (typically ads and
extremely low server specs).
Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites
should pick VPS or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly
powerful server specs. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared
hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server's resources, which are
also a bit more segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you
should pay less than $100 per month.
Dedicated hosting places your site on a server all by itself,
so it can leverage a server's full power. This is the most expensive type of
hosting; you may end up paying $100 per month or more for this raw power.
Reseller hosting lets you start your own branded web hosting
business without worrying about building the infrastructure from scratch.
WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment that caters to the
world's most popular content management system. And cloud hosting? That's an
entirely different beast that lets you easily scale website power across
multiple servers, though not every web host offers it. Yet. The pricing for
these hosting tiers are all over the place, so shopping around is vital.
Check out our various explainer articles (linked to in the
paragraphs above) for a deeper dive into each hosting type.
Best Web hosting
2. Bandwidth Isn't the Same as Data Transfer
"Bandwidth" and "data transfer" are
frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website
serves to visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same
definitions.
Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be
transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual
amount of information that can be used over a given period of time—typically a
month. Think of it like this: a web host may have a maximum 5GB bandwidth, but
depending on your hosting plan, your site may only allow 1GB of data transfers
per month.
Note: If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data
transfers due to a Reddit hit, for instance, a web host may slow your site's
data transfer speeds or charge you a fee as a penalty. It may even prompt you
to upgrade to a higher web hosting tier. It's good to know your site's data
limitations before you run into situations like this.
3. Unlimited Isn't Quite Unlimited
Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting
plans by tempting you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data
transfers. It's generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I won't say that
these web hosts are straight up lying, but the "unlimited" storage or
data transfers boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company.
FatCow, for example, offers "oodles" of disk space, and states that
there's no cap on a user's content—as long as that person remains fully
compliant with the company's terms of service and utilizes storage "for
the normal operation of your FatCow website." It's just like the
bottomless shrimp buffet: Eventually a restaurant will cut you off, if they
don't simply run out of shrimp first.
Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated
with shared or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild…within limits. If
your blog gets a steady stream of reasonable traffic (whatever that may mean!),
you'll be in good standing. However, you shouldn't expect to upload or stream
50TB of data per day. The average joe isn't doing that is likely dabbling in
some questionable activities.
You should consult a web host's terms of service, or a
customer service representative, to learn exactly what you can and cannot do
within the scope of your plan's unlimited offering. For example, DreamHost
states on its website that the company doesn't track "bandwidth or
traffic, so you never have to worry about pesky overage fees."
4. The Hard Disk Drive/Solid-State Drive Tradeoff
If you're looking to sign up for shared web hosting, you'll
likely receive real estate on traditional hard disk Drive (HDD) server. The
advantage of an HDD-based server is that it can offer large storage amounts on
the cheap. As you move up the hosting ladder to more powerful offerings, such
as VPS and dedicated, web hosts will give you the option to build a site on a
solid-state drive (SSD).
SSD-based servers are lightning-fast storage units. SSD
technology is still pretty pricey, so your SSD-based servers typically carry
much smaller storage totals than HDDs. You'll rarely see 1TB SSD servers, which
is a number that's commonplace in the HDD arena.
The SSD vs. HDD discussion is a lengthy one that goes well
beyond the scope of this article. I recommend reading Tom Brant's excellent SSD
vs HDD: What's the Difference?
5. A Linux Server Will Do...Most of the Time
Nearly every web host offers Linux as the operating system
that powers their servers. In fact, I don't think I've reviewed a web host that
lacked the free, open-source OS. Even if you aren't familiar with Linux, you
don't need to do any special work on the back end to build a website. Website
builders make building sites a breeze.
That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting
frameworks, you'll need to run with the Windows Server operating system. That's
because the script your write and webpages your produce will only function in a
Windows-based environment.
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