What is a Web-Hosting? Is it really necessary to choose a good web-hosting company for your website?

There is no particular definition for ‘Web Hosting‘. The name itself indicates that it is hosting web files. Generally, as per science, a host is a place where the organisms survive, and they depend on the host for their needs like shelter and food materials too in some cases.

In simple words, a host is a home or a place where we live, eat, sleep, excrete, etc. A place where we do our daily activities. In terms of web technology, a host is a place where all our website files are placed together which interact with each other to deliver the final content to the visitor.

A web hosting account is usually associated with a fixed amount of digital space where you can upload your website files and databases. Generally, a web hosting company provides you a certain amount of digital space of disk depending on the amount you paid for a web hosting account. You can use that space for hosting all the data related to your website.

There are a lot of services available on the internet that promises you for providing the best web hosting account for your website. But in fact, only a few among them are genuine and authentic.

In general, all the files of your website including HTML, PHP, SQL, Javascript, etc. require a place where they interact with each other to provide a response to the visitor’s query. This place, in other words, is called a Web hosting account.

Without a web hosting account, your website will be just a bunch of files without any activity. Generally, a web hosting account has readily installed operating systems like Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows, etc. which makes your website files interact with each other for providing responses to queries.

Uploading your website files to an empty disk space without any operating system installed is worthless, your website doesn’t work at all.

Hope you came to know why a web hosting account is generally required for your website to work.

Most of the companies that provide the services of web hosting declare that they provide unlimited hosting for a low affordable monthly subscription. However, these companies pose a restriction on things that you don’t know, or else your website will get an error that the resource limit of web hosting account is reached due to simultaneous processes of your website.

Be aware of any such fraudulent web hosting service providers. First, read reviews of a web hosting company then only choose any one company for your website.

I will let you know a few important things that should be considered prior to choosing a web hosting account –

• Disk Space – Look how much disk space the web hosting company is providing for your account. Most of the services declare it as Unlimited, however, there is nothing in the universe that is unlimited. Everything has a limit.
• Bandwidth – Look how much bandwidth the web hosting company is providing for your account. This is very important because a web hosting account with low bandwidth can’t hold your website for a long time. The bandwidth should be more than enough. Most of the companies declare it as Unlimited too.
• Inodes Limit – Look for inodes limit. An inode is a single file. A large number of website files means then you need a high inode limit. Most of the services, that declared disk space and bandwidth as unlimited, put restrictions on inodes. Plan accordingly depending on the inodes limit.
• CPU Cores – Look for how many cores CPU is allotted for your account. It actually depends on the amount you paid. More cores CPU require more money. However, do confirm whether more cores CPU is available for an affordable price.
• MySQL Simultaneous Connections – Look for MySQL simultaneous connections limit. More is the limit, then only your website will connect to the database with ease for visitors’ search queries.
• Websites Limit (Add-on Domains) – Look for how many websites you can host on your web hosting account. Most of the services declare it as limitless add-on domains. However, it’s not true at all. The web hosting account will reach the resource limit if you host more than 3 websites that have a good number of visitors.
• SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Technology – Look whether the web hosting company is providing the free SSL or not. The websites with SSL and security will get high rankings in search engines.
• Domain E-Mail – Look for brand email feature whether the hosting company is offering or not. Few services offer only 5 domain-named email accounts while most of the services declare that the email creation and usage with your domain name is unlimited.
• Customer Support – This is extremely important and should be considered as the top priority before choosing a good web hosting company. Errors among the websites and web hosting accounts are more common, the technical support team should be available at any time to help you out in solving the error, or else they should respond to you in a short time and resolve your issue.

All these should be considered along with the public reviews then only you will come to know which one is a good and affordable web hosting company.

I would like to suggest to you the following –

• Don’t think of a budget prior to choosing a web hosting company because hosting your website on poor accounts (i.e., servers) will never make your website appear on the top of search results, this is because the resources available for that accounts get exhausted. Usually, the search engines require a large number of resources as the search engine bots crawl our website and put the information on the search page. This process usually consumes more resources, which is not possible with poor web hosting accounts.
• Select a web hosting company that is years old and continuously had good reviews for a long time.
• If you don’t have any idea of websites and web hosting accounts, then give it a try by creating a free web hosting account. There are services that offer free web hosting. However, the restrictions are high and the functions are limited. To try it once, a free web hosting account will really be helpful to you.
• Compare the prices, plans, and features of different good web hosting companies, and choose the company whose plans are affordable and with great features.
• Try to subscribe to the web hosting plan minimum for a year and make the payment, meanwhile, you can focus on the website, and its maintenance and development. Monthly renewal is a headache process and if it fails due to some reason then your website will go down and until you make the payment it won’t me up.
• Try to check out all the features that are mentioned above i.e., disk space, bandwidth, inodes, database connections, etc., before purchasing the plan subscription.
• Keep your website always optimized so as to prevent the high consumption of web hosting server resources.
• Don’t forget to monitor the CPU usage, Bandwidth usage, Disk Space usage, etc., of the web hosting account regularly. You can do that by logging into the control panel of the hosting account.
• Don’t hesitate to contact the support team of web hosting companies when you face any errors related to either your website or web hosting account.
• Please do note that, as your website grows you need more resources and a private server instead of shared hosting. You have to upgrade your hosting account during that time.

This is the information that you must know before you are going to purchase a web hosting account subscription.

Hope by the end you came to know about what is web hosting and how important it is for a website. It is also concluded with this topic that a good web hosting account is quite necessary for successfully managing and maintaining a website. At the very final, you are provided with tips for choosing a good web hosting company.

Now, it’s time to learn about a list of top web hosting providers.

Thanks for reading…! We will meet again in our next article…!