Welcome back to our intro series on how to make a website. In previous installments, we’ve taken a look at what it takes to get started making your new website and the basics of registering your domain name. Today, we’re going to cover the next important step in the process—establishing and setting up your web hosting.
A lot of times, people will just assume they should obtain hosting from the same place they registered their domain name. More often than not, this is probably not a very wise idea. Web hosting is an interesting facet of the how to make a website process—you don’t necessarily need the most powerful or most expensive hosting when you’re just starting off, but there is a such thing as bad web hosting…something you’ll certainly want to avoid.
What makes a “bad” web hosting service?
Hosting servers and resources are shared by hundreds or even thousands of websites…on each server. This inevitably causes problems from time to time when just one of these thousands of neighbors installs something on their website that is a resource drain, gets hacked, or ends up being a spammer themselves. It’ll slow your site down too…or break it altogether. Worse, your site could wind up being penalized or blacklisted by the search engines for a long time by sharing an IP address with a spammer.
Web hosting that isn’t designed for the task. In other words, you won’t want to try to host your website on your own computer or server at your office or home. Work and home computer systems just aren’t designed for the robust kind of connectivity and uptime that hosting a website professionally requires.
Another sign of a bad web hosting service is poor support. Finding a web host that fully understands their own product and system is often a challenge in and of itself. And then there’s the commitment required to keep the system up to date and maintained for peak performance. Finally, and probably most importantly, is the customer service factor—does the webhosting service have full time support service staff that will actually pick up the phone, be able to fix and issue, and are able to communicate with customers in a common sense, down-to-earth way?
So clearly, you’ll want to be on the lookout for these possible scenarios when setting up your web hosting.
What are the different types of web hosting?
Shared hosting: This is when you share as web server and resources with several other websites. For those just getting started, this is a good thing as long as the hosting service is committed to maintaining great performance and keeping the “bad neighbor” situation under wraps.
Virtual dedicated hosting: This is kind of like shared hosting, but instead of sharing all of the same resources with other websites, you’re guaranteed a specific allotment of storage and memory on a specific server. It’s a good balance for the intermediate website.
Dedicated hosting: This is when your website is hosted on its very own server within a web hosting data center. It’s quite expensive and typically reserved for complex, high-traffic websites that really need more control and more resources.
It’s easy to get caught up in the do-it-yourself mentality when making a website and setting up hosting…but it’s also important to remember that sometimes there is a better way. And when it comes to hosting, there is such thing as an excellent full-service web host that really doesn’t have to cost much more than the bargain basement variety.
Set your website up on the right foundation by using the top-quality web hosting. It’s well worth the headache and frustration you’ll save by avoiding bad hosting.