What Type of Hosting Should I Get for My Website?
If you own any type of website, regardless of its functionality or purpose, you most definitely need a hosting provider in order for your content or products to be shared online with other people, users and potential worldwide. A number of different types of hosting providers exist, each offering you a set of divergent plans that you can choose to utilize from. However, before rushing to make any type of purchase, ensure to do your own research or even better – allow us help by doing a part of it for you.
There are a plethora of hosting types that are widely available online. The 3 most common, however, are shared hosting, dedicated hosting and virtual private servers. Each of these has its own advantages and drawbacks and it is absolutely crucial for you to get acquainted with each separate type in order to maximize your return of investment while also making the most optimal choice in terms of server resources and available features.
Are you the owner of a personal blog or a small local store?
If the answer is yes – then this section is exactly for you! Small local stores and personal blogs are usually places or information hubs, which users visit in order to obtain both general and specific information. Because of this, such websites are not usually resource-heavy and do not require a spectacular amount of operating and processing power in order to render and function upon user interaction. Therefore, the most popular hosting plan option amongst such websites is shared hosting. As evident by the name, in shared hosting a number of individual websites occupy the same server, meaning that they are obligated to share that server’s resources between each other. Due to this, a sudden increase in traffic on one site can lead to the other websites experiencing slower interaction and load speeds, which can, consequently, negatively reflect on important search engine ranking factors such as the user experience. Additionally, shared hosting also does not provide you with any extended customization features. However, this should not be a problem if you are maintaining your own personal blog or local storefront page as it will be highly unlikely for you to have the need to handle any real-time information exchange in huge volumes. The most substantial benefit of shared hosting is that it is very cheap due to the aforementioned reasons and yearly subscriptions are not that expensive in comparison to the other hosting types.
Do you have a large e-commerce store? Are you a famous or innovative service provider?
If you happen to either sell items or provide exceptional and unique services online, then you should consider investing in a dedicated server. A dedicated server is the exact opposite of shared hosting as you purchase an entire server for your own independent utilization, meaning that you are not required to share its resources with others. This, therefore, makes dedicated servers an ideal choice for companies and businesses that deal with an incredible amount of user information and constant data exchange processes such as managing user accounts and databases, processing online orders, goods dispatchment and their tracking. However, this is not cheap in the slightest as dedicated servers are usually quite expensive and can only result in a positive return of investment if you can leverage them to increase your own profits.
The alternative – a VPS
Maybe you do not fall under any of the previously mentioned categories? Or perhaps you do, but are not interested in sacrificing quality at the cost of a slightly higher price? You should not worry as there is also a solution for you and it is titled – a virtual private server (VPS). A VPS implements virtualization technology to generate a virtual machine as its own separate instance with its personal resources while being located on a server with others. A VPS can be considered as the best of both worlds due to the affordable relation between its price, features and quality.
A virtual private server does cost slightly more than a shared hosting plan, however, it is also less expensive when compared to a dedicated server. Furthermore, you also have the ability to control and customize your server’s resources. This means that you can fully tailor the operating memory, processing power and storage to whatever suits you and your business. Additionally, you also gain complete root access to your server, which allows you to download and install custom software that can aid you in operating your server and website.
Moreover, there are companies like VPSBG that provide their customers with the ability to pay for their servers using both Bitcoin and Litecoin, in addition to implementing payments through the Lightning Network. Using cryptocurrencies to pay for your hosting is a great alternative for those, who either do not have access to traditional transaction-conducting methods or desire to spend less for international money transfers. Not to mention the fact that payments made with crypto are more secure and reliable as they are stored in the global blockchain, which records every transfer ever made.
Finally, and most importantly, with a virtual private server you only need to pay for the resources that you use, making it the perfect option if you are unsure about the amount of traffic and load your website will encounter, receive and experience. Moreover, if your website happens to quickly gain popularity, you can always purchase additional resources in order to accomodate the drastic rise. Also, this works both ways – if you have invested in paying for a lot of resources but the website falls short of its expected number of visitors, you can always remove these resources and continue to pay less. This scalability is easily the most crucial feature and greatest advantage of this type of hosting and should not be neglected.
Choose carefully
Although it might be difficult to try and anticipate the amount of traffic and monthly visitors for your website, make sure that you put some effort into attempting to predict those values as they will inevitably play a vital role in your final choice in terms of selecting a hosting plan and a hosting provider. Remember to also conduct your own independent research on your selected provider and ensure that they offer you important features such as technical support and additional help with both setting up and managing your server along with resolving any potential issues that can occur with your server.
