What is web hosting?
Web hosting is a server space provided to an organisation or a person to upload and store website files and databases that can be accessed by domain from anywhere in the world. Web hosting service provides resources consisting of software and hardware resources that store and make website files accessible over the internet via a domain name e.g. www.google.com.
A web browser on a desktop, laptop, or mobile phone can be used to access the website over the internet. Web hosting companies can offer a different kind of packages depending on the limit of the resources.
A web server is a special kind of computer that stores all the files of multiple websites and enables users over the internet to access those websites.
Types of web hosting services
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is an ideal choice for individual and small business start-ups as it is affordable and offers the basic features required to host and run your website within no time. All you need to do is to buy a domain name and choose the best web hosting company to buy cheap hosting. Multiple websites can be hosted on shared hosting with separate Cpanel accounts to manage your websites.
VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. This type of web server shares physical resources within multiple websites but it creates separate partitions with allocated resources for each website thus making the websites load and run faster with more resources as compared to shared hosting. An increase in website traffic makes little or no impact on the website performance making it an ideal choice if you have greater user traffic on your website.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting offers maximum resources of a server for a single website. By selecting a dedicated hosting server, you control all the server hardware and software resources, configure it all the way you want it, and customise the complete hosting environment according to your own specification. Dedicated hosting is ideal if you have a very large website and business application with unlimited traffic.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting uses multiple, geographically dispersed virtual servers for high reliability and maximum uptime. The biggest advantage of using cloud hosting is that if one server goes down, another server takes over which maintains and runs your website or application without any interruption. Organisations with large-scale business applications such as e-commerce websites use cloud hosting for maximum uptime, to handle large user traffic, and to prevent DDoS attacks. Another big advantage is the scalability of the resources. Cloud hosting runs on Pay As You Go model. During less traffic or when there is minimal usage of the website or web application, the resources automatically downgrade to avoid large bills. Similarly, when there is a huge traffic volume and a large number of visitors are visiting your website or application, the resources automatically increase to handle large traffic thus maintaining optimal performance of the website.
WordPress Hosting
While other website hostings are also suitable for hosting a WordPress website; WordPress hosting provides an optimised environment to host a WordPress website. On a WordPress hosting, the WordPress environment is already set up by the web hosting company so you don’t need to install or configure the WordPress environment. WordPress hosting comes with pre-installed wordpress themes, plugins, and other necessary tools required to build a website hosting.