What is website hosting?
Website hosting is the environment where your website lives, your rental space on the internet, but what does that mean? Your website is made up of several components including CMS systems, content like images and text as well as other applications. In order for a user to visit your website all these components need to be stored somewhere and delivered to the user quickly and correctly.
Types of hosting for your website
Shared hosting environments
VPS hosting environments (Virtual Private Server)
Dedicated hosting environments
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting environments are generally regarded as the most affordable hosting environments for websites starting out and shared hosting servers are best suited for websites that don’t need a lot of resources. While most websites will be able to meet their goals on shared hosting some websites will not as the principle of shared hosting is many websites will be held on the same server thereby sharing data, bandwidth and other resources. This means that your website performance could be impacted by the “neighbouring” websites on the host’s server.
VPS hosting
Generally regarded as the next step up from shared hosting, VPS hosting or Virtual Private Server hosting is where you would move your website to for hosting once your website needs more resources allocated to your website. While VPS hosting is still shared hosting the big difference is that each website while sharing the server has its own allocated resources.
Dedicated hosting
Once your website is no longer seeing the performance benefits of the VPS hosting environment it is time to invest in a dedicated hosting environment for your website. While having a dedicated server hosting your website will give you the best results for website performance this server can be very costly which can sometimes cause businesses to hesitate when needing to make this move.
What hosting do I need for my business website?
Small business website hosting
Most small to medium-sized businesses will need a shared hosting environment or a VPS hosting environment if your business needs to good online presence. Remember your website hosting environment will also impact your search engine optimization score and as such your ranking in search engine results.
E-commerce website hosting
Product-based websites tend to be ‘heavier’ websites. This means that e-commerce websites or websites that use a ‘shop’ functionality are made up of more items for example all the product images and information that needs to be provided to your user. It is for this reason that e-commerce
websites experience limitations on shared hosting environments. Small ecommerce sites will manage efficiently on a VPS hosting solution but bigger websites will definitely need to look at dedicated hosting options.
Brochure website hosting
As with small to medium sized business websites a brochure website is meant to provide information to the user and as such these websites benefit the most from a VPS hosting environment, while they will function on shared hosting.
Choosing the right hosting provider and the right hosting environment can make all the difference to your website’s performance.
