The Definitive Guide To Choosing A Website Hosting

Choosing A Website Hosting: Operating your website has long since ceased to be reserved for large companies. As an essential part of every marketing concept, more and more retail stores, craftsmen, restaurateurs, and private individuals are using this channel for their own purposes. While creating a website is no longer as complicated as it used to be, there are also more web hosting providers who are represented on the market with different products and hosting models.

The selection of a suitable web hosting model primarily depends on the new website’s purpose, scope, and expected traffic. Basically, all standard providers offer comparable hosting models. This post is intended to present an overview and primarily provide a kind of guide for choosing a suitable hosting provider for companies and private individuals who do not yet have their website.

Choice of Domain

According to SFGate.com, before choosing a web hosting provider, future website owners should develop a good and concise domain name. When choosing the domain name, particular care should be taken; after all, it is, so to speak, the figurehead of every website. Basically, two different types can be distinguished here:

Exact Match Domains

An Exact-Match-Domain (EMD) is a URL that exactly matches the main keyword of the corresponding website. The advantage here is that users can already see the website’s purpose when reading the URL. However, since the Google Exact Match Domain update, EDMs are no longer preferred to other domains from a search engine perspective.

Brand Domains

A brand domain is a URL that contains a brand name. The advantage of a brand domain is that it can be used for a long period of time. In the context of a change in the product portfolio, a brand domain is usually still suitable, while when using an exact match domain, in the worst case, a new domain adapted to the new products must be created. Obviously, this involves a considerable amount of work.

How Do you Find out if a Domain is Still Available?

You can usually determine whether a domain is still available on the hosting provider’s website. There is also the option of using  MarkenChk to determine whether a domain name is still available.

A Summary of the Different tTypes of Website Hosting

As soon as a domain has been selected, the task at hand is to find a suitable hosting option. As mentioned at the beginning, selecting the appropriate model depends on factors such as size, purpose, or the expected number of visitors to the website.

Free Hosting

Free web hosting models seem tempting at first glance, but the providers of these solutions must generate income just like their paid competitors. For this reason, it is ordinary practice for the operator to place advertisements on websites that are operated via a free hosting model. Often, providers in this model forbid it to place their own advertising on the website. At the same time, because there is already advertising from the hosting provider on the website, there is little or no space for your own advertisements. In turn, you can earn money through your own advertising banners, which means that hosting is practically free. Furthermore, websites with a lot of advertising can be downgraded in the ranking by Google.

Only subdomains are provided under the provider’s address with free hosting offers. Therefore, this type of hosting is not recommended from an economic and SEO point of view. Furthermore, free web hosting offers have further disadvantages insofar as the support and setting options, and the security of the websites are severely limited.

Shared Hosting

Several hosting provider customers are assigned to a web server with shared hosting. Each customer thus has access to a virtual server. Since the customers share the server’s resources, the performance is usually limited compared to other models. The performance can therefore vary depending on the load on the other websites on the server. Usually, different models make more computing power of the server available with rising prices. However, this method is still practicable for websites such as blogs that do not require high computing power.

Cloud Hosting

Similar to shared hosting, cloud hosting also uses virtual servers. The difference, however, is that not only the hardware resources of a single server are accessed, but a server cluster. The advantage of this is that the distribution of resources means that there is extensive hardware redundancy, i.e., very high availability and a low probability of failure. Furthermore, cloud servers are almost infinitely scalable, and the performance can be billed precisely according to resource consumption. In contrast, there is shared hosting, where only certain service packages can be booked.

Dedicated & Managed Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, customers of a dedicated or managed hosting package have sole access to a server. While there is usually limited access to the system with managed hosting, this is unrestricted with dedicated hosting. It also follows that the hosting provider has to take care of maintenance with managed hosting, while this task is left entirely to the customer with dedicated hosting.

Both variants are also suitable for complex web projects, as only one customer is entitled to the entire server performance.

Reseller Hosting

A third party acts as a reseller between the hosting provider and the customer with this hosting variant. Resellers are often agencies that offer their customers a new domain to match their new website. In this context, mostly shared or managed hosting models are used, in which neither the reseller nor the end customer has to worry about the maintenance of the server.

There are two options to choose from which are limited or unlimited reseller Hosting, both come with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Own Web Server

In terms of performance, a dedicated web server is in principle comparable to a dedicated server. When ordering their own server, of course, customers have every conceivable freedom with regard to the configuration and performance of the device. Still, they have to maintain the software on the server themselves and a dedicated server. In addition to the software maintenance, for example, hard drives have to be replaced regularly, and technicians have to be called in case of problems. It is also advisable, for example, to accommodate a server in an air-conditioned room so that the likelihood of overheating is minimized.

In contrast to all other models, the use of your own web server guarantees sole access to the data on it. In principle, it can never be ruled out that unauthorized third parties will access a server that is not located in your own office. In addition to performance, this security aspect is often the reason why own web servers are used.

Conclusion

In summary, it can be said that the choice of a hosting provider may seem trivial at first, but it attracts large circles. The type of web hosting is ultimately responsible for the performance, security, and numerous other essential factors. First of all, you should check which of the various hosting models makes sense for your own purpose. A comprehensive comparison of different hosting providers should then be carried out.