What is Web Hosting? and Why You Should Use It

By Yhordan Serpentini | January 10, 2022

As a small business owner, it is important to expand your company to the media as fast as possible. Doing so will let the public know that your business exists, sparking interest to check out what you have to offer. Here’s one problem, you need an improved website for your business to operate as both a marketplace and a digital form of advertisement.

If you have been on the internet long enough, you have likely heard of web hosting. It is important for you to use web hosting for your website as it is relatively convenient in every aspect. If you’re hesitant about using web hosting or have no idea what it is, then read further to understand what a web hosting service is, and why you should use it.

What Does Web Hosting Do?

A web hosting service is simply a type of internet hosting service for websites. It is mainly used for improving the amount of data that your website can store within a server, how fast said data can be stored, increasing connection/performance speed (not to be confused with faster internet), and providing a direct address search—commonly referred to as a direct IP address—via a dedicated domain name. When you web host your website, you are basically either renting a spot in a server, renting a single server, or renting multiple servers to store and access your website’s data.

Custom Domain Name

Web hosting also offers you a custom domain name. A domain name is like a digital address. When you type something in a search engine, the words you type are converted into an IP address that locates all files, documents, images, websites, etc., that match the IP address of the words you searched. In other words, it lets the search engine know what you’re looking for. This is why when you type “cute cat videos” on Google, you will likely be directed to videos on YouTube with titles related to “cute,” “cat,” or “cute cat,” but never the exact title of “cute cat videos.” Google can’t find anything with that exact title so it redirects you to other IP addresses that similarly match what you searched.

As an example, our company’s name is Jaeli Capital Consulting. If people were to search for our company’s name on the internet, they will be redirected to other IP addresses that match the words “Capital” and “Consulting.” To ensure that potential clients are directed towards our website’s link, specifically, when searching for our name, we customized our website’s domain name to match our company’s name.

If you look at the search bar of this very blog, you’ll see that our domain name is jaelicapitalconsulting.com—that is because we ourselves directly connect to a web hosting server. If we were to use a free website-creating service, like Wix.com, our domain name will look something like wix.com/jaelicapitalconsulting; potential clients will have a harder time trying to find our website because you need to type a more specific domain name. This is one of the significant benefits of web hosting.

Types of Web Hosting:

There are multiple types of web hosting services for you to choose from, which is great for you depending on the type of website you want to build and the type of budget you are willing to set for the success of your website. Listed below are the six types of web hosting services currently available:

Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is a perfect starter for websites in their beginning stages. As the name might suggest, shared hosting is when multiple websites all share the same server—this includes the same access memory, processing unit, and crashes. One thing to note about shared hosting is that you are restricted the most compared to other service options, which is expected when multiple websites run on the same server. If you are planning to start a normal entry-level website, shared hosting is cheap and affordable; though you would likely have to search for better hosting options as your website grows.

Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is one of the best options on this list, but it comes at a significantly high price. In short, dedicating web hosting gives you the most control over the server(s) you are exclusively renting for your website. This option—though fantastic for web hosting—is heavily discouraged for new website owners because of the drastically high price. It would only be recommended to use dedicated hosting if you know for certain that your website will skyrocket in a matter of days/weeks, and you will need to maintain a decent rack of servers to store the data of such excessive traffic.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting is basically the middle child of web hosting. It works similarly to dedicated hosting, in the sense that it gives websites their own space on a server to store data, rather than sharing a server or renting one exclusively. Think of it like renting the backyard shack, rather than the entire house or sharing a house with others. VPS hosting is definitely a great option for those who want more control at low costs, but similarly to shared hosting, it is not a suitable service option if you need to manage high data traffic.

Cloud Hosting: Cloud hosting is very untraditional compared to the previous server options. Instead of your website’s data and storage relying on a single server, it is instead hosted on a network of connected virtual, as well as physical, cloud servers. In other words, your website’s data is accessed via digital programs that then store it over the internet, rather than directly to a server or hard drive.

Some of the benefits of cloud hosting are increased server uptime which results in your website performing better, flexible pricing structure, resources being easy to scale, and being updated to the latest and greatest technology on the market. Although cloud hosting sounds convenient, there are technological vulnerabilities to consider, such as data loss or leakage, account hijacking, and overall weak security compared to other options on this list.

Managed Hosting: Managed hosting sounds exactly as it implies. When hosting a website, you will have to spend a lot of time managing your website’s servers yourself, which can be very time-consuming during certain occasions; managed hosting basically frees up that time by doing the majority of the work itself. Some of the benefits of having managed hosting are having your server(s) monitored, data and storage managed, data backups, reduced operating costs, and better server/data security.

Colocation Hosting: Colocation hosting is by far the most expensive option on this list. Most web hosting services will keep your rented servers in-house, but colocation hosting offers you the option to rent a spot in a highly secure data center facility. To quickly summarize, colocation hosting offers the best equipment, servers, space, bandwidth, and security, compared to the other five options, which is why it is the most expensive.

Average Costs

If you’re interested in web hosting your website, you must know that every good thing comes with a price. Don’t worry, though! Some web hosting services are affordable if you’re on a budget, while some others can range a little higher in pricing. The type of web hosting service you want mainly depends on the type of website you want to build, as well as how much data traffic it typically encounters.

Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is by far the cheapest of the six services, ranging anywhere from $2-$15/month.
Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is one of the most expensive hosting services, ranging anywhere from $80-$730/month. It mainly depends on how many servers you want.
VPS Hosting: As mentioned earlier, VPS hosting is like dedicated hosting at the same cost as shared hosting; it can range an average of $15/month.
Cloud Hosting: Unlike other services, cloud hosting is billed by hour. The rounded hourly cost can range an average of $5 a month for 1Gb of RAM, 25GB SSD storage, and 1 CPU core, to $650 a month for 128GB of RAM, 3TB of storage, and 24 CPU cores.
Managed Hosting: The third cheapest option on this list, ranging an average of $50/month for quality-managed hosting.
Colocation Hosting: Colocation hosting is easily the most expensive option, ranging anywhere from $80/month for a single server, $400-$600/month for entry-level servers, or over $1000/month for more powerful configurations.

Sources:

Lahn, M. (2020, June 19). Cloud server pricing guide. Knowledge Base ServerMania. Retrieved January 9, 2022, from https://www.servermania.com/kb/articles/cloud-server-prices/
Whitfield, H. (2021, November 15). How much does it cost to host a website?: Compare 2021 prices. Website Builder Expert. Retrieved January 9, 2022, from https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/web-hosting/cost-to-host-a-website/

What is Web Hosting? and Why You Should Use It