Best Website Hosting Options
Website hosting is a service that stores all your website data on its servers. Then delivers it (or serves it) from your site to anyone online who tries to access one of your pages.
Web Hosting Options
When you choose a host you will usually be on a shared server. This is a larger server that holds many website databases. Starting out you may only need a cheap hosting plan, but it is important to have a plan that can grow as your website gets more traffic.
There are five things to consider when choosing a web host;
- Hosting Bandwidth
- Storage Space
- Uptime
- Ease of set-up
- Security
What’s Hosting Bandwith
This is the amount of traffic coming to your site. You pay more for larger bandwidth because extra resources are used to allow traffic to access your site. So, if your server hosting plan is too small for the traffic you may not reach your audience because you have used up all of your bandwidth.
What’s Hosting Storage Space
Your web hosting storage space is the amount of space you have available to store your website data. The amount you need will be determined by how big your site is and how many images it contains.
A website with mostly written content will take up less space than a food blog with pictures and videos.
What is Uptime
As website publishers, we would like to think that our blog is available 100% of the time. Unforetunelty this is not all the case. Sometimes servers “go down”. When your host’s server goes down your website is not available to consumers.
Now if that wasn’t bad enough there is another consequence, Google doesn’t like websites that crash. So if you’re with a host that is having server issues you could lose domain ranking.
Ease of Set-up
Some hosts now offer a really easy WordPress setup. If you’re a beginner this is going to be important as it can take some of the stress out of the process. Once upon a time, you would buy your domain name, purchase your hosting plan, point the DNS records to your host and wait 24 hours for the information to propagate. Then you would have to set up a WordPress account and add it to your host’s server.
NOW, there are a number of hosts that provide a one-stop shop. You buy your domain name through them and simply choose your hosting and add WordPress and it’s all done for you in about 2 minutes.
Security
Servers come under malicious cyber attacks so the security of your host is of great importance. There are many different types of attacks, some aimed at accessing information and passwords. Others are aimed at sending so many requests to the server that all the websites on the servers crash. It’s important that your host has a robust security system and has a history of being able to rebuke attacks as they are always happening.
Namecheap
Namecheap is one place that can give you a complete setup with just a few clicks. Take a look at their plan options.
BlueHost
BlueHost is another fabulous option. You can literally start by testing domain names in the name checker. Once you purchase your name through Blue Host you can choose your hosting plan for just $7.99 per month!
This service meets all the gold star “up-time” requirements and is super fast. Best of all, if you’re leaning towards using WordPress for your website platform, BlueHost provides a one-click WordPress setup. So it really couldn’t be easier!
Crazy Domains
Crazy Domains is another reputable company that ticks all the boxes for hosting reliability and ease of use.
High Traffic Websites & Blogs
These above are my recommendations for new websites and blogs. There will come a time when you will outgrow these three cheaper web hosts. You will know this has happened when:
Generally, if you have any of the following:
- Regular traffic of around 20,000+
- A website or blog heavy with photos or video
- Serving advertisements on your website
- your page speed is slow, and you can’t do anything to fix it.
- your site keeps “going down”.
BigScoot
Once you find you need to migrate your site to a faster server. I thoroughly recommend BigScoot. I actually start my websites there because I am confident I will be moving them around the one-year mark so it makes things easier.
This means I also have a faster site from the very start! It’s a little bit of an unfair advantage really, but I will take what I can get. Google loves fast-loading sites. This helps the website to rank quickly and gain more traffic. It’s a competitive advantage.
Take a look at BigScoots plans here. One last thing, if you do decide to migrate, BigScoot will do it for you at no charge!
Conclusion – Website Hosting
I hope you have a better understanding of what a website host is, and what to look for in a good host. At the end of the day, you are trusting the host to block cyber attacks, have fabulous up-time statistics, be fast, and have real, accessible people should a problem occur.
Above are my top 4 Hosting sites. If I were to give you my top two I would say BlueHost and Big Scoot by a country mile!
