Web hosting service tips

From our experience, we believe these are the five key things to consider when selecting yours:

1. You almost always get what you paid for If your website is primarily a hobby on the side then this shouldn't matter as much. However, as an essential business tool, it's often a false economy to go for the cheapest hosting deal (or a free one) on offer but that doesn't mean that all cheap deals are bad.

2. Beware of pricing tricks. The overwhelming majority of web hosting vendors offer low prices at the beginning of their contracts, but jack up the pricing after the introductory period ends, which can be 24, 36 or even 60 months after signing up. Always look for the total cost of ownership. As for the above, it doesn't mean that paying five years in advance is a bad thing.

3. Just how trustworthy is the hosting provider? Just about anyone can pretend to be a real web host and just be reselling someone else’s products. So, look to see how long they’ve been around, if they have a contact address, who owns them, are they making realistic promises on the website and so on. Google is your friend here.

4. Know your limits. How comfortable are you with creating your own website? Do you need external help to understand the numerous ramifications (including legal and commercial ones) that publishing one entails?

5. Consider web builders You don't need web hosting to get online, and site builders offer an interesting and compelling alternative. However, you can't migrate your content easily if you want to leave because of their proprietary nature.

The best web hosting provider right now is Bluehost. The reasons are many but succinctly, it provides with an excellent value for money, hosts more than two million websites worldwide, is recommended by WordPress and offers free SSL certificate and free domain with a long money back guarantee and unlimited bandwidth on all its plans.

Web hosting is the generic name given to the business of, well, hosting a website for organizations or individuals. Truth is that it can be done by individuals (e.g. I host a website from home) or by businesses. But that's just the beginning: selecting a truly reliable, affordable, scalable web hosting provider is a daunting and overwhelming task, as there are so many options out there.

Many packages include a wealth of features that you may or may not place value upon, including a mailing list, a control panel, the ability to create online stores easily, simple web building tools, and varying levels of support (either over the phone or live chat).

Whether you're looking to build a website for yourself, a website for your small business now or for the future, or a simple online store, or you just want to save money by moving to a cheaper web hosting provider, we've got you covered.

Choosing a host is very much a case of 'horses for courses' – it's a question of getting the best and most appropriate solution that you can afford. There's no need to hamstring yourself financially, though. If you're just starting out, or you're a relatively small business and you know your way around a server, you might like to consider a Virtual Private Server (VPS), for example – these provide the flexibility of a dedicated server, but at a reduced cost. 

Think of web hosting providers as landlords and servers as properties. 

Shared hosting is like renting each room in a property. Put too many websites on one server and the quality of service can drop if some become too popular or hog too many resources (think noisy neighbors and bathroom huggers).

VPS is a step above shared hosting. You get your own private virtual server (the equivalent of flats) but you still share some amenities with others tenants that live in the same block like the garden or the doorway.

Dedicated hosting is the equivalent of a house; an entire server just for one customer. Expensive but worth it if you are ambitious. There are still limitations though but dedicated hosting allows for more flexibility.

The “building” analogy applies to the other variations/categories: eco-house, retail stores, art displays, houses in India, land developers etc.

In a shared hosting service, one user shares a server with other sites and web hosting accounts. While these are cheaper, shared hosting is best suited to smaller websites that don't use a lot of bandwidth resources.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Cloud hosting enable you to scale resources as and when you need them, rather than being restricted by the limitations of a physical server. They draw from a pool of processing power, memory and storage depending on your requirements. VPS usually take one physical server and allocated dedicated resources whereas cloud hosting take a bunch of servers and allocate resources across them.

With a dedicated web server, you have the entire web server for your own use, with significantly faster performance at the core of the offering. You will have to pay extra though, and you'll be responsible for maintenance.

Web hosting companies usually offer three main paid-for tiers of hosting packages. Other than the aforementioned tiers, we will also be considering WordPress hosting, as well as more powerful website builder software.  

PS: We've used the word resources a lot in this description. The word itself is an umbrella term for compute (like the processor), storage (the SSD or HDD), system memory (RAM) and networking (usually the bandwidth and throughput).

The hosting services your business can choose from will usually mean making a decision about whether a shared, dedicated, or cloud-based server is right for your business. 

Very small businesses will usually opt for a shared or managed service, as these are sometimes called. Costs are low, but your business will be sharing its server with several other enterprises. You can always move up to a virtual private network (or VPS) if needed.

A dedicated server, as its name suggests, is just one server reserved for your business. Dedicated servers are not as expensive as they once were, and can make economic sense if you want your business to have its own server platform, and don't want to have to worry about other businesses on a shared server impacting your online business if they have problems.

It's important to look closely at the service level (SLA) that will be attached to your dedicated server. Look for any additional costs, such as maintenance, or other 'extras' that aren't covered in the rental cost.

And lastly, try and buy server space that you can expand into. You don't want to find after a few months that you've outgrown your server and need to move to a new one.

Lastly, as the cloud has made a major impact right across the business environment, business web hosting has also embraced the cloud, and now offers an alternative to the traditional hosting methods. The power of cloud hosting is the flexibility it offers: in effect, your business can buy just the space and hosting services it needs now, and expand at anytime with no disruption to business.

Everyone loves free stuff, and it comes as no surprise that free web hosting services are wildly popular – but unless you're planning to use them to learn coding or run a personal website, we wouldn't advise using a free web hosting service.

Don't get us wrong: we love them, we've even produced a best free web hosting guide; however, using them for businesses purposes is fraught with potential issues that make it hard to recommend them.

Unlike free software, services (web hosting or VPN for example) cost money to run, which is why most web hosting companies use a freemium business model, and will try to convince you to move to a cheap, paid service.

Expect a number of limitations on disk space and bandwidth. You won't get an SSL certificate, which is a sine qua non condition for running a proper business website. You won't have regular backups, and some will even shut down your website for one hour a day!

Instead, we'd recommend checking out our best cheap web hosting sites guide, which we regularly update to include the hottest deals around.

The largest web hosting companies in the world right now can be assessed either by market capitalization, by number of customers, by how many websites they host, by revenue or by the estimated number of monthly visitors they get to their own website.

As of March 2021, the biggest web hosting company is Godaddy when it comes to market capitalization, followed by United Internet and Newfold Digital (which is private but involved a transaction valued at around $3 billion).

Some might argue that Wix - with a $17 billion market capitalization - and Square, the owner of Weebly, are even better web hosting companies. By that logic though, one should include the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Alibaba and Microsoft Azure, all of which are far, far bigger.