Having a website is substantive to every business that wants to have an online presence and reliable web hosting is the lifeblood of a successful website presence. Though invisible, yet it is an essential element of your website as everything about your website will live on this web hosting space.
Website hosting may be the most underappreciated part of the World Wide Web because it is not seen or interacted with by visitors to your website. It is only seen and interacted with by the developers and engineers who set up and configure the infrastructure upon which your website runs.
This article will assume that you do not have any prior knowledge about web hosting and will attempt to help you understand what you need to know to understand how web hosting affects your website presence. Let’s dive in.
We will be looking at:
- The meaning of web hosting and how it works
- When you should consider web hosting
- What you need to host your website and how to go about it
- Some hosting types you could consider for your business
- How to choose the best hosting provider
- Frequently asked questions
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is a service that enables you to publish your website and its files on the internet. So, without a web hosting service, there is no way that your website can be made publicly accessible. Everything you love about the internet, from podcasts to memes, articles, tweets, forums, online gaming, Netflix and so on, all live on powerful computers, called servers, which are maintained by highly trained engineers and developers who ensure that the server stays online round the clock.
Web hosting is the entire process of making the files, resources, documents, images etc. about your business publicly accessible to your website visitors or customers on a 24/7 basis by uploading them onto a web server and managing them there.
How web hosting works
The idea behind web hosting is similar to looking for office space from where to run your business. Say you run a tailoring business, you will need to rent an office space where you will place your cutting table, ironing board, one or more sewing machines, a sewing box comprising some utility tools like threads, thimbles, pins, needles, buttons etc.
You may also need several other tools like a tracing wheel, trimming scissors, tapes, bent-handled scissors, rulers, pincushions, tailor’s chalk, carbon paper, flat iron, display case, hangers, storage racks, style catalogues, you know the works! Every single tool and equipment is very useful and unique for its own function. If you cannot find a busy business area to site your workshop and to keep all these equipment and tools safe and operational, so as to run your business from there, you may not be able to do the business effectively.
In the same way, when you choose to own a website, there are a lot of files, scripts, and code for the website, similar to the equipment, tools cloth that the tailor needs for her business. These files and code will be required to build, deploy, manage and monitor your website on a daily basis. Web hosting is the office space (or workshop) where those files and scripts will be placed on the web.
Similar to how a seamstress will need to locate her business in a busy area where passersby can easily see her shop and patronize her business, a good web hosting for your website would place your business on the web thereby providing your business higher visibility and increasing the chances of online traffic being able to see your business and patronize you. The good thing is that this traffic may not be limited to your geographical area. You could target the whole world as your audience, because as the saying goes, “the world wide web is a global village“.
So when anybody who clicks on a link to your website or who knows your business’s domain name or internet address, types it into their web browser and hits the enter or send button, the query is sent to the webserver hosting your website and the server serves your website back to the client or the person’s device requesting your website.
This makes it possible for your website to respond to multiple visitors to your website (or your business at the same time). People can even be browsing your website, learning about your goods and services and even making purchases while you sleep!
When should you use web hosting?
There are different kinds of hosting for different purposes, but when should you opt for web hosting?
There is email hosting which you only need when you must have your emails hosted (or stored) on a separate server dedicated to that purpose alone. Such servers have been configured to perfection to handle security, routing and deliverability of your emails. Most serious businesses whose daily processes and operations depend heavily on email often go for this option.
There is file hosting that allows businesses to store mission-critical business documents and data on the cloud so that they can rest assured that their data are protected from disaster, hacking, malware, ransomware and so on. Things like permissions and privileges to access this data are also provided to meet exact business needs. Examples of such services include Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, Amazon S3 and many more.
There is image hosting which allows businesses and individuals to store and sometimes share images privately or publicly on a server that allows high definition image processing, analysing and fidelity. They are often popular among photographers, vacationers, tourists and hobbyists. Examples of image hosting services include Google Photos, Imgur, Flickr etc.
There are many other kinds of hosting but in the context of this article, web hosting allows businesses and individuals to store all the different files and resources that work together to form their website. These files often include program codes, scripts, databases, spreadsheets, images, videos, embeds, slides, recordings, and so on. Everything that makes it possible to view a website on your computer or on your phone (everything except your web browser, your device and your internet connection) is hosted on a server somewhere. It could be a server you have rented and are managing yourself or one that you are paying someone to manage for you.
What do you need to host your website?
The first thing you must need (or intend to soon have) is a website. For more information about having a website, see this post about launching your business website.
Next is a domain name that reflects your business or brand name. If you have already registered a domain name for your business, then you should simply purchase a web hosting plan so that you can host your website.
After you have purchased a suitable web hosting plan, upload your website content (files, data, code etc) to your web hosting account and then set up your domain name to point to the name or IP address of your web hosting server and you’re done. Then whenever someone tries to access your domain name over the internet, they will arrive at your website.
Web hosting types you could consider for your business
If you have been considering hosting a website recently, you might have come across differing web hosting categories and probably wondered what they meant. Here are the most popular types of web hosting:
- Shared Hosting: if you go for this type of web hosting, what it means is that the server hardware on which your website will be hosted will be sharing its resources among several hundred or thousands of other websites. These resources include computing power, memory, storage etc.
A good analogy to relate this to is an apartment building with several tenants who all share the same water tank, gate entrance, stairwell, parking space and so on. If one client messes up the stairwell, forgets to lock the gate, or uses too much water, it will affect the other tenants adversely. Similarly, one user’s excessive use of the server could adversely affect the other users on that server, but rest assured that things will never go out of hand because like the caretaker or landlord who calls the erring tenant to order, the webmaster has put automated processes in place to penalize and possibly disable the website of any user when it is suspected of fraudulent activity.
This sharing of resources lowers the cost since the overall cost is shared across many customers, hence making it ideal for newbies, startups, websites that don’t generate revenue and low traffic websites. - Dedicated Hosting: think of this as the opposite of shared hosting in that instead of sharing a physical server with thousands of other customers, you own or lease a private server, which can be anywhere in the world, entirely for your purpose and use. No sharing of resources means that you bear the entire cost of the server, hence, this is several times more expensive than shared hosting.
This is not ideal for a startup or a small website still testing the waters. This is not for you if you are on a low budget. This is for enterprise-level websites and applications that generate a lot of traffic and revenue and would need a very large amount of resources to store their data. The server is fully customized, better performant with more storage capacity than other hosting plans. Did we mention that you will have to take responsibility for the systems administration and frequent management of the server?
- VPS (Virtual Private Server): but what if you cannot afford a dedicated server and do not like the idea of sharing a server either? There is a middle ground that brings together the best of both worlds: a private server, no physical hardware, isolated from other websites on the same server in a virtual environment and shared to reduce the cost by a great deal. Sounds good, doesn’t it? This virtual server gives you full domain access to control your account as if it is a dedicated server, but is more flexible than the dedicated hosting.
This is ideal for websites that have outgrown the need for shared hosting but can’t afford to break the bank for a dedicated physical server and all the pain that come with system administration.
- Cloud Hosting: this takes VPS hosting up a notch in that where the VPS hosting fails, cloud hosting racks up points. VPS is not scalable which means that as more demand for memory, storage and computing power happen, the system would probably just crash, but cloud hosting would automatically scale up to accommodate the influx. With VPS hosting you pay for the entire resources you rented whether you are using just 10% of it or 100% of it at a time.
Imagine renting a warehouse for a year but only storing a few bags of goods in it. You will still pay for the whole warehouse nevertheless. Cloud hosting would allow you to only pay for the portion of that warehouse that you actually used, and for the amount of time that you used it, no more or less. With cloud hosting, you are not paying for the computer but for the computing service. So it is cost-effective, has ultimate flexibility, and comes with unparalleled performance and reliability. It serves a rapidly growing website much better than any other hosting type.
Each has its pros and cons. Very small websites often do just fine on shared hosting. However, the other types will give your website plenty of room to grow and provide better performance and uptime.
Deciding which hosting type suits your website and future plans should be easy if you follow every guideline on this post. Even so, if you’re completely new to this, and find the process unnecessarily complicated for your needs, scrap the list and go with a shared hosting account. It’s cheap, easy to maintain and will be sufficient for most websites, especially new ones with lower traffic. When your site grows bigger, you can upgrade to VPS or Dedicated hosting at any time.
Key things to consider when choosing a hosting provider
Many people who want to host a website get stumped around the question of which hosting provider to choose. Any company or individual can claim to be the best when it comes to web hosting, but “best” is relative as we have found in the industry that a hosting provider may be best in providing one major facility or feature but mediocre in many other key areas.
For example, a provider may offer you unlimited web storage, but their uptime would be less than 99%. While another provider may offer 99.9% uptime but technical support is a nightmare.
While credibility is another factor to consider, this only derives from the overall quality of service and it doesn’t matter whether they are new to the industry or as old as dinosaurs.
There are four (4) core features in our opinion that any web hosting service should have to make your list of consideration:
- Availability: this has to do with the uptime guaranty. Constant outages are a no-no. Your website is no good to your customers if it is not reachable when they want to access it. You will lose customers and eventually money.
- Value for money: regardless of the cost, whether cheap or expensive, what you pay must be justified by what you get. Some people like to choose the cheapest hosting service out there, but it often comes at a price.
Great web hosting services require effort to provide and maintain which in turn costs money, so don’t rob yourself of a great web host just because you want to save a few hundreds of naira. - Packages and features: does the web host offer all the packages and features you need for your project? Are they configurable, upgradable and downgradable? In the event that you do not need some of the features, can they be disabled? Can you install the scripts and components you need for your particular type of project, and with ease?
- Technical support: this is a deal-breaker. If you don’t have reliable and knowledgeable tech support but have everything else, you should run.
No matter how knowledgeable or tech-savvy you are, you will eventually run into issues that only the admin can resolve whether in the form of security, backup, transfers, component upgrades.
If it takes forever to resolve your issue or they don’t get resolved at all, or your support tickets get ignored or dropped, then you have a hosting provider that does not care about you.
Of course, there are more things to consider like reviews, but there is no web hosting company out there that does not get a lot of bad reviews. Not one. There are a lot of reasons for this, and we can’t go into them all. Our list only mentions what we have come to believe is a universal constant that every web host must perform very well at to be competent, whether great or small.
The best way to judge a good host is not on their pricing. Would you still gladly pay N10,000/year for your eCommerce project if you knew that a N50,000/year plan would have performed far better and optimally?
Frequently asked questions regarding web hosting
What is the difference between web hosting and domain name?
Web hosting is a virtual space you rent online where all the files for your website are uploaded and served from while a domain name is the web address that points to your web hosting or email hosting. A domain name is your unique brand or business name identifier online which can be used to route or point to the services you offer your customers on the internet
A domain name and web hosting are two different services that work together to make it possible for you to have a website. Without a domain name, it will be impossible for people to find your website and without web hosting, your domain will point to a location that does not exist because you don’t have a website.
What would I need in order to start building my website?
In order to build a website for your business, you need to first register a domain name for your business or brand or project and then afterwards purchase a web hosting plan.
Once you buy a domain name and web hosting for your business, you can start building a website. A domain name alone without an associated web hosting will limit your usage of the domain name if your goal is to have a website.
I registered a domain name many years ago but I want to now purchase my web hosting from a different company, is this possible?
Yes, it is 100% possible. You can have your domain and web hosting from two different companies and have your domain name point to your web hosting by making changes to the DNS records. DNS means Domain Name Server.
Think of the DNS as the contact records in your phone where one of your contacts has changed their phone number. You can simply update the new phone number for that contact. Similarly, you can update the name server associated with your domain name with your web host’s DNS and it will take effect worldwide in a matter of hours.
Bear in mind that you could also transfer your domain to a new domain name registrar. This is something we do free of charge when you purchase any new web hosting plan from us. This is convenient because you get to manage and renew both services under the same dashboard and not have to log into two different companies to get that done.
How long does it take to host a website?
Most web hosting companies are usually able to provision any new web hosting type in the same time period it would take to boot up a computer. That said, it may still differ from one web host to another. At ZechServer, your new web hosting service will be available for use in a few minutes.
Once this has happened, you can begin to upload your website files to your account and your website will be accessible depending on how quickly you upload and set it up.
A domain name on the other hand would take a while to propagate after it has been registered for the first time. Propagation is the process it will take for your newly registered domain name to be recognized by all the apex domain name servers all over the world. This is important if your domain name must be publicly accessible.
Is a hosting plan payment a one-off or a renewable service?
It is a renewable service depending on the tenure agreement with your web host provider. Most plans are renewable for a year or more while some are renewable on a monthly basis or even quarterly.
Are there any serious risks to choosing to use a cheap web hosting plan?
This is very similar to asking if there are any serious risks to buying a cheap laptop computer. Apart from the fact that they are assembled from poor grade hardware, have low battery life, unreliable connectivity ports, irreplaceable parts, less durable, nearly impossible to fix if it breaks and inferior in every other sense of the word, cheap web hosting could get you into near similar trouble. There could be slow processing speeds, limited bandwidth, limited features, poor administration interface, poor security and easy to hack, horrible support, and worse of all, frequent outages which hurts your website’s reputation and availability. If you mean business, cheap web hosting will cost you more in the long run.
That’s all folks! We do hope you got some value. Stay in touch. There’s more to come and always open those emails and read up when they drop.
Have a great year.
