This is why so many website owners have so many hosting problems!
They don't know which are the best web host choices to make through lack of in-depth knowledge of the business.
This site has been created to help those people to get a better understanding of what is involved with the system of hosting their websites and which choices they should make to secure the best web host they can afford.
Basically, a web host is a place for a website to be uploaded to and made visible to the worldwide web of the Internet.
It's just a big computer, known as a server that provides you with an allocation of disk space and bandwidth for your website's files to occupy and be reached and viewed by browsers around the world.
Along with the basics of storage space and bandwidth, almost all hosting companies provide you with additional tools that you can use to enhance your site's visibility and look as well as it's load speed and user-friendliness.
While all these features are common to just about all hosting providers, the level of service is different from one to the next. This is what you really need to be aware of before getting out your credit card and paying for your next host.
The most important points you need to know about a prospective host is how reliable their service is and how good their customer support is.
It's not much good getting a cheap webhost and finding out later that your website is spending a lot of time either down or very slow loading. This does happen and it usually happens if the company is using older less reliable equipment or they're over-selling.
A good host will invest in the best, most up to date equipment to ensure their customers get the best possible level of reliability, uptime and the fastest load times. Cheap hosts will often be less rigorous about their hardware and connection speed and that will be reflected on the uptime and load speed of your website.
This is a common practice particularly with shared hosting packages. What happens is a high number of clients are given allocations on a server that push the limits of the available memory and CPU processing power. When everything is running OK, this is not generally a problem.
But as soon as one user starts getting a big spike in traffic that is more than their allocation is designed for, it puts too much load on the server and all the other customer website will suffer a slowdown.
The problem is less pronounced for "reseller" packages as there are generally fewer of these per server. Less still for "VPS" packages and of course a "dedicated" package means there is only your account on a server.
The best place to have your website is on a big server with as many resources as possible. That includes lots of storage space (disk space) to allow for expansion, fast processor with ample memory and good connectivity to the fastest links available.
There are numerous configurations of server design and layout. Choosing the best for the price can be a hard job, but one well worth following through with thorough investigation.
Always remember that a server is basically just a box full of components and there is a physical limitation to how many of those components you can squeeze inside.
Despite those limitations, it is perfectly possible to get all the space, memory and processing power you would ever need for even a large, interactive and high traffic website from the right hosting service.
The last point I want to bring up on this page is about a server's ability to maintain the security of your data.
Evert minute of every day, computers connected to the Internet are subject to attack from individuals or agencies for a variety of reasons from basic, mindless maliciousness to the business of trying to steal data or prevent certain data being displayed publicly.
Hackers are busy building and deploying their bots to do whatever they are designed to do and a host's biggest problem is keeping them at arm's length from your data and their systems. Good security measures are essential as well as making sure that all software is kept up to date with the latest releases and patches for known vulnerabilities.
A great website is no use to anyone if nobody can see it because their host's server is compromised by malicious entities. Even worse if your site gets hacked and either injected with malicious software (malware) that can harm users in some way or have its core functionality broken or deleted.
It all boils down to making sure you have uploaded your precious website to the best hosting service you can afford to buy. And that's not just a sales pitch to get you to buy a certain product. It's common sense stuff you should be aware of and putting into practice because if you value your website, you should be prepared to pay the extra to ensure it stays online, safe and working the way it was made to.