Most of us wants to have their own website, whether it is to publish content or to sell products. Having a website to showcase all of these gives us a platform where we can talk about our thoughts or industry innovations, and share them to the billions of people online.
But the biggest misconception is that creating a website is as easy as purchasing a domain and designing it for maximum appeal. How the Internet works is much more complicated than that. Especially if you are creating a website to start a business, you must know the parts of a website and why each exists.
In this article, we are going to pay particular attention to one of the most overlooked elements of creating a page: website hosting.
Website hosting in simple English
Our website is basically made up of a bunch of files; and files need to be kept in a folder, in a computer, that is constantly connected to the Internet. This computer is what we call a server, because when people visit our website, it is technically being ‘served up’ by the computer.
This is basically what website hosting is, because we’re paying for our website to be consistently served online. While you can host your website from your own computer, what we want is to avoid shut downs. We purchase this service from Internet registrars like Crazy Domains because they have backup systems that can handle an enormous amount of traffic so we can avoid website performance issues.
Different kinds of hosting
There are three different kinds of hosting to choose from. Your choice will depend on the online goals you have set for the moment. Of course, you can always switch from one hosting to another once these goals have changed.
- Shared hosting
When you get shared hosting, you will be sharing one hardware server with other users, and will only be given your own disk allocation. The only caveat for choosing this hosting is if one of the websites sharing your space is overusing the hardware system. This may cause poor website performance for other websites.
- Dedicated server hosting
Of the three options, this is the most expensive mainly because of you will have your very own server. This is perfect if your website carries a lot of graphics, you wouldn’t need to be affected by the risks of a shared hosting. At the same time, you wouldn’t cause the poor website performance of others as well.
- Windows VPS hosting
This is where both the characteristics of shared hosting and dedicated server meet. Basically, the hardware system is divided into smaller virtual machines through technology that virtualises an entire operating system. So while you are sharing a hardware system with other websites, you will have your own system allocation.
For first time website owners, the best thing to do is to purchase the hosting on the Internet registrar you bought your domain from. For instance, if the domain name is currently under the Crazy Domains registrar, the website can be hosted on their server as well to avoid lots of confusion.