So you are ready to start that blog or online store you’ve always wanted and you can’t wait to see your website appear on the internet. Now what?
How do I get my website on the internet?
You need two things to be able to have your own website show up on the internet:
- A domain – this is the relatively easy part, but you can read some quick tips about getting the right domain for your website in another post soon.
- Hosting – this is what we’ll focus on for the rest of this article.
If a website is like your home and a domain is like an address for people to be able to know how to get there, then hosting is like the land and foundation upon which your house is built. When looking for a home, location of the property (the street, city, country, etc.) can impact how much you pay in taxes as well as the typical weather conditions, noise level, rules and opportunities you may encounter while living there. Accordingly the files and data that make up your website (text, images, videos, and code) reside on a computer (server) located somewhere, usually in a big remote warehouse, which is configured with certain software and features which allow it to be accessed from any other device connected to the internet.
So the host is the person or company you hire to provide that server and keep it running for you.
Your choice of web hosting can impact how fast your site loads, how big your site can be, how secure your site is, how often problems occur that cause your site to go down, how easy it is for you to manage your site, and of course, how much you pay. There are certainly a lot of options to choose from whether you are selecting the hosting service provider or choosing from the available service plans they may offer.
Types of Web Hosting
Let’s first look at the different types of hosting providers. The first choice you make comes down to how much control (and responsibility) you have over the server. I break the options down into three main types:
Website Builders / Full Service
These are providers like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly. They provide tools to help you build your website and they manage all the technical stuff for considerably higher monthly rates, usually $15-30 USD per month. That doesn’t seem like much but remember that rate is per website and per month. So if you are looking to have multiple sites or would like to keep your site around for more than a year or two, a little multiplication can help you realize it might be worth spending a little more time learning about the other options to save a bit more money down the road. Since this is ThriftyWebmaster.com we aren’t going to spend any more time on these full service hosts because the truly thrifty want to reduce costs, especially those recurring monthly or annual fees that really add up over time, so that brings us to our next options…
Traditional Web Hosting Services
These providers offer a range of services from shared hosting to virtual private servers and dedicated hosting solutions for people who want to host one website as well as resellers hosting many clients sites. Names of some familiar players in this space include GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, DreamHost, Hostinger, and my personal favorite, A2 Hosting. Most offer some type of website builder or managed hosting options but the real value is if you can learn the tools included in control panel software like CPanel or Plesk which handle most of the technical heavy lifting but still require you to understand some nerdy stuff to accomplish what you need for your site. Much of this blog is dedicated to walking you through these tools, so keep reading to learn all you need to become a thrifty webmaster. If the semi-technical stuff doesn’t scare you away to Wix-land, then you may want to look into the most complex hosting option…
Cloud Hosting
These providers are the new movers and shakers in the web hosting game, because of the true flexibility, scalability and control you have over every resource. You have probably heard of Amazon Web Services (AWS), but other tech giants also offer comparable services now such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The utility of these services extend well beyond that of standard web-hosting into hosting for mobile app services, software-as-a-service, and even powering computational resources for academic research. But with great power comes great responsibility.
You pretty much need to have basic computer science fundamentals locked down and be able to fully manage a server on your own. Also it can easily become much more expensive than the other types of hosting previously mentioned. I delve into these services a little bit on this site but would rather defer to the experts.
Once you’ve figured out which kind of adventure you want to choose, then comes the part where you need to sort through the myriad options you need from the provider.
Traditional Web Hosting Options:
The main factors to consider for traditional web hosting are:
- Number of sites to host
- Site Speed
- Storage
- What type of Operating System (Windows or Linux) and software you want to run
- Whether you need root access or not
Cloud Hosting Options:
As discussed above, cloud hosting offers a much more scalable solution by leveraging resources across a large number of devices instead of being constrained to a single machine. That means you really have to understand what type of resources you need and how to most effectively use them to keep costs from skyrocketing.
The main resources to consider for your cloud hosting needs are:
- Compute power (Site speed)
- Storage
- Database
- Network resources