Do you want to start your own, personal online business venture? Or maybe you desire to share your travel stories or cooking recipes with others who might share similar interests in relation to learning about a new holiday destination or unique and innovative cuisine types? Perhaps you are searching for a job or working freelance and you are in need of a place to showcase your skills, projects and portfolio? Regardless of the case, it is likely that you will require a website or a web application to utilize as a platform for any of the aforementioned hobbies, work and business ideas. However, in order for your website to go live and be accessible to anyone worldwide, it firstly needs to be hosted.
Hosting providers offer different hosting plans that you can choose from that have different options and features that you can select from depending on the purpose. A website or a web application goes live on the Web once all of the content has been uploaded to a designated server. Afterwards, it gets crawled and indexed by special dedicated web crawlers, which make the website available to anyone through the search engine results pages.
Appropriate Hosting Plan
Choosing a hosting plan that will suit your ideas is probably the most important step that you need to consider prior to making any decisions. There are a plethora of different hosting providers, each of which can offer you a wide range of their services. However, each service has its own individual advantages and drawbacks, which you should be aware of.
Shared hosting is the most popular and widely available type of hosting. Its main advantage is the fact that it is relatively cheap in comparison to other hosting types. This is due to the fact that a number of individual websites are being hosted simultaneously on a given server, meaning that they are all required to share the same resources. Consequently, this can lead to some websites suffering from resource deprivation should another website on the same server happen to experience a drastic increase in traffic or load, hence why this is its greatest disadvantage. Furthermore, you are also not capable of fine-tuning your server as you do not have the ability to manage individual components or install any additional software.
A Virtual Private Server, most commonly referred to as a VPS, on the other hand, utilizes virtualization technology in order to create your own virtual machine for your server to run on. Simply put – you have your own independent server resources, which you are not required to share with anyone else. To further illustrate this, It is like owning a flat in an apartment block – you live with certain people at the same location, but they do not have access to your property and vice versa. A VPS also allows you to manage most of your resources separately including the processing power, the active memory and the storage. Moreover, you also gain complete root access to your server, meaning that you are capable of installing and managing additional software that can help you when operating and maintaining your website. One of this hosting type’s most substantial advantages is its scalability. While most hosting plans are predefined, meaning that you are required to pay a certain, set amount of money regularly, a VPS offers you flexibility by allowing you to further add or remove certain resources should your traffic happen to either increase or decrease drastically. While this type of hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, its flexibility is definitely worth the investment.
Finally, there is also dedicated hosting. With this hosting type, you are provided with an entire server just for yourself, which you can fully customize. Dedicated hosting is usually utilized by large service providers, tech giants and huge online ecommerce companies, which need to quickly process a lot of information regularly, resulting in this type of hosting being more expensive in comparison to the previous two.
Server Location
Server location is often neglected due to the extremely fast Internet connection and browsing times that we currently observe in this digital age. On the contrary, the geographical location of your server plays a very pivotal role in terms of information exchange speed. Information can be released and obtained faster when a user is closer to the hosting server, meaning that it is important to choose a hosting provider that can offer you a server in the region that you specifically want to target. This flexibility, server placement and availability are extremely important, especially if you want to decrease response time and improve the overall speed of your website or web application.
Customer Support
Setting up and managing a VPS or a dedicated server can be quite the hassle if you do not have any prior experience. Because of this, it is important to choose a hosting provider that is capable of offering you 24/7 customer support in order to help you resolve issues with your server should any problems occur. Additionally, look for a hosting provider that has a low response time so that you would not need to wait for extended periods of time.
Payment Methods
There are many traditional payment methods available to most people worldwide including bank transfers and PayPal among others. However, did you know that you can also pay for your hosting services using cryptocurrencies? Companies like VPSBG offer their customers the ability to pay for their servers using both Bitcoin and Litecoin as alternative payment methods. Paying with crypto is very secure as every transaction is encrypted and stored in the blockchain. Additionally, you are also capable of paying worldwide effortlessly and less costly, making this a viable alternative should you not have access to traditional payment methods in your country.
Company History and Policies
Make sure to read through the company’s privacy policy and check their background history. Ensure that they have not had any previous cases of information leaks, hacks and publicity stunts. Reputation, mission and trust are also important factors to keep in mind.
Choosing the most appropriate hosting provider is a matter of considering multiple factors that can potentially impact your online business, blog or application both positively and negatively. It is important to conduct your own research before making the final choice and we hope that our 5 things to consider will help you find your perfect hosting provider.
