5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting Before You Sign
Up for an Account
Web hosting may
be the most underappreciated part of the World Wide Web. Everything you love
about the Internet—podcasts,
memes, articles, tweets, websites, online gaming, Netflix content—lives
on a server that an individual or company pays to keep up and running so that
you can access it. Web hosting is an invisible yet essential element of the
online experience.
If you're considering, say, launching a website, there are several basic
web hosting aspects that you should be familiar with before starting the
project. Although it's relatively easy to sign up and use a provider's supplied website-building
software to swiftly create an attractive, functional
front end, there are a lot of related terms and concepts to wrap your head
around. As you'll soon see, some of it is confusing, if not outright contradictory. Here's what you need to know about web hosting
before opening an account.
1. There's a
Big Difference Between Hosting Types
If you've spent any amount of time on a web host's website, you've
probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated,
cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types,
but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one
another in significant ways.
Nearly every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest form of web
hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and
server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting
budget small, and don't expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go.
You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting type.
This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don't need a
huge amount of bandwidth, however. Since you're sharing resources with other
sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your
site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors.
Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites should pick VPS
or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly powerful server specs.
VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far
fewer websites share a server's resources, which are also a bit more
segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less
than $100 per month.
Dedicated hosting places your site on a server all by itself, so it can
leverage a server's full power. This is the most expensive type of hosting; you
may end up paying $100 per month or more for this raw power.
Reseller
hosting lets you start your own branded web hosting
business without worrying about building the infrastructure from scratch. WordPress
hosting lets you build a site in an environment that
caters to the world's most popular content management system. And cloud
hosting? That's an entirely different beast that lets you
easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web host
offers it. Yet. The pricing for these hosting tiers are all over the place, so
shopping around is vital.
Check out our various explainer articles (linked to in the paragraphs
above) for a deeper dive into each hosting type.
2. Bandwidth
Isn't the Same as Data Transfer
"Bandwidth" and "data transfer" are frequently used
interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to
visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same definitions.
Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at
one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of
information that can be used over a given period of time—typically a month.
Think of it like this: a web host may have a maximum 5GB bandwidth, but
depending on your hosting plan, your site may only allow 1GB of data transfers
per month.
Note: If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data transfers due to a
Reddit hit, for instance, a web host may slow your site's data transfer speeds
or charge you a fee as a penalty. It may even prompt you to upgrade to a higher
web hosting tier. It's good to know your site's data limitations before you run
into situations like this.
3. Unlimited
Isn't Quite Unlimited
Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans by tempting
you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It's
generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I won't say that these web hosts
are straight up lying, but the "unlimited" storage or data transfers
boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company. FatCow, for
example, offers "oodles" of disk space, and states that there's no
cap on a user's content—as long as that person remains fully compliant with the
company's terms of service and utilizes storage "for the normal operation
of your FatCow website." It's just like the bottomless shrimp buffet:
Eventually a restaurant will cut you off, if they don't simply run out of
shrimp first.
Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated with shared
or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild…within limits. If your blog gets
a steady stream of reasonable traffic (whatever that may mean!), you'll be in
good standing. However, you shouldn't expect to upload or stream 50TB of data
per day. The average joe isn't doing that is likely dabbling in some
questionable activities.
You should consult a web host's terms of service, or a customer service
representative, to learn exactly what you can and cannot do within the scope of
your plan's unlimited offering. For example, DreamHost states
on its website that the company doesn't track "bandwidth or traffic, so
you never have to worry about pesky overage fees."
4. The Solid-State Drive/Hard Disk Drive Tradeoff
If you're looking to sign up for shared web hosting, you'll likely receive
real estate on traditional hard disk Drive (HDD) server. The advantage of an
HDD-based server is that it can offer large storage amounts on the cheap. As
you move up the hosting ladder to more powerful offerings, such as VPS and
dedicated, web hosts will give you the option to build a site on a solid-state
drive (SSD).
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SSD-based servers are lightning-fast storage units. SSD technology is
still pretty pricey, so your SSD-based servers typically carry much smaller
storage totals than HDDs. You'll rarely see 1TB SSD servers, which is a number
that's commonplace in the HDD arena.
The SSD vs. HDD discussion is a lengthy one that goes well beyond the scope of
this article. I recommend reading Tom Brant's excellent SSD
vs HDD: What's the Difference?
5. A Linux
Server Will Do...Most of the Time
Nearly every web host offers Linux as the operating system that powers
their servers. In fact, I don't think I've reviewed a web host that lacked the
free, open-source OS. Even if you aren't familiar with Linux, you don't need to
do any special work on the back end to build a website. Website builders make
building sites a breeze.
That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting frameworks,
you'll need to run with the Windows Server operating system. That's because the
script your write and webpages your produce will only function in a
Windows-based environment.
There's an additional benefit: Microsoft apps, such as Office or
Outlook, integrate with the server with ease. The downside? Windows servers are
incompatible with Linux-based, open-source software unless you do some
tinkering.
Windows servers cost approximately $10 to $20 more than their Linux
equivalents, but if you need Microsoft's tools it's a small premium.
For more web hosting tips, check out How to Create a Website and How to Register a Domain
Name for Your Website.