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Key Takeaways
Web hosting is where your website “lives.” It’s the server that stores your site’s content and makes it available online.
There are different types of hosting. Shared, dedicated, and cloud hosting offer different levels of performance and scalability.
Your hosting choice should match your needs. Not all websites need the same level of power, your hosting should scale with you.
Cut-rate hosting can cost you more in the long run. Saving money upfront might mean lost traffic and revenue later.
Quick Hosting 101
In the simplest form, there are two main parts to having a website; a domain name and website hosting.
The domain is just a user-friendly term for people to type into a browser to find your website. Without a domain, your website would look more like 162.17.442.121 a.k.a. an IP Address.
Website Hosting is just a computer that is always on 24-7 that holds all your website assets; images, text, CMS (content managements system), database, etc. – everything that makes up your site. It literally hosts all your website content. The specs of that “always on computer” is what dictates how fast your website loads to visitors. Other elements of the “host” factor into how well your website performs such as PHP version, CDN’s and a few other nerdy things we can skip, but overall, it’s the power of the computer that drives most of your website success.
Hosting servers a.k.a. “always on computers” are no different than the computers on your desk or in your lap, they have CPU specs, RAM specs and Hard Drive specs. If you just work on Excel spreadsheets and Word Docs all day, you don’t need a lot of computing power. If you’re a video editor, you need A LOT of power. Excel files are small and simple, video files are massive and take a lot to render on your screen quickly. Excel is a small program in terms of requiring computing power, Video editing programs require a lot more computing resources.
Think of your website classification as either an Excel user or a Video Editor.
Why Web Hosting Matters
We’ve established your hosting is just a computer and for the sake of moving this article along, you put your website on a fitting hosting plan – the right amount of space for all your website assets. Yet, just making sure your stuff fits on the host does not mean excellent website performance.
The last big factor regarding hosting performance – how popular your website is. You can have a simple one-page website but if you get 10,000 visitors a day, you’re taxing your hosting server. Each visit requires that computer to bring up all your website information and show it to each visitor – this is called bandwidth and if you have a hosting server with under powered bandwidth limits, your website is going be sooooooooo slow to each visitor.
You might not think much about web hosting, but for businesses that care about performance, uptime, and flexibility, hosting is a huge factor.
Speed Affects Everything
Visitors expect pages to load in under 2 seconds. If your hosting is slow, people bounce, meaning they leave before doing anything. That hurts your engagement, conversions, and SEO.
Downtime Costs You
Cheap hosts often cram hundreds of websites onto the same “shared hosting” server. Potentially, one or more of those sites can get very busy with traffic without warning and hog all the hosting server resources. That means your site could be unavailable for minutes, or hours, without warning.
Flexibility & Control
With the right hosting, you can add features, expand your traffic, or even run complex apps. With the wrong host, you’re stuck waiting on support or dealing with rigid templates.
Types of Hosting (Simple Overview)
There are three main types of hosting. Each has pros and cons depending on your needs:
Type | Best For | Pros | Cons |
Shared Hosting | Small/personal sites | Cheap, easy to use | Slower, less secure |
Dedicated Hosting | Demanding websites with higher traffic | Full control, fast | Expensive, more maintenance |
Cloud Hosting | Ideal for e-com stores and resource-intensive applications. | Scalable, reliable | More expensive, some learning curve |
This is a very simplistic overview of the three main types of hosting. Within each category there are several facets of improving such hosting options i.e. paid add-ons, different providers offering specialized or proprietary benefits, etc.
What About “Hosted” Solutions?
Everything outlined above is hosting “you own” in the loosest term and is commonly referred to as “Standalone hosting.” It’s more like leasing but you have total control except for being able to physically hold the actual hosting computer.
What about WIX, Sqaurespace, GoDaddy Website Builder and others? These are what are referred to as “hosted” website solutions. You get to build a website on their platform but have little to no control of the hosting options. Behind the curtain, things are handled for you.
Hosted solutions are typically great for new businesses, proof-of-concept website ideas and smaller turnkey businesses.
This isn’t the article to go into Hosted vs. Standalone but if you have no one to help you (i.e. an agency like us), these are great options to get started.
Final Thought
Web hosting isn’t just a technical decision, it’s a business one. If your website is a key part of how you make money or connect with customers, don’t let bad hosting hold you back.