The Truth About Website Hosting

How complicated can web hosting be? Hosting is a commodity, right? Not so fast…

While it’s true you can get website hosting for $5 a month (sometimes less), just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In the following video, taken from the 1st OpenCamp Meet Up, John P. explains the different types of website hosting, the costs associated, and the good and bad of the different options.

Web hosting is one of the single most essential aspects of running a website and is the foundation upon which your site is built. If you’re running a business or planning to make money from your site, you need to give careful consideration to what type of hosting will best suit your needs. A few things to think about include:

• How capable are you of maintaining a web server yourself (hint: most of us don’t want to do maintenance ourselves)?
• What will your budget allow?
• How much traffic do you expect to get?
• How heavy will your back-end processing be?
• How much does your site/hosting need to scale?
• What will the ramifications be of your site going down? Will it affect your business, your revenue?

How to Pick the Right Hosting Company for Your Website

Notes:

• Shared hosting means you are on a box with literally thousands of other websites, what do you think happens to everyone else if one site get’s really busy?
• Google gives consideration to how fast your server is, how fast it responds & how fast your site loads into the equation of how much traffic to send you. The faster and more capable your server the more traffic Google will send you.
• VPS (Virtual Private Server) and Virtual Machines are “in-between” options that can save you money and allow you to scale.