Every business owner knows that in order to stay up-to-date and compete in today’s market; he needs to adopt the Internet as his storefront.
Let’s be realistic, currently, around 3.6 billion people use the internet (and the number is growing by the second, according to Internet Live Stats), which amounts to around 40% of the world population and any business owner who isn’t trying to capitalize on that is missing out, to say the least.
Now, the increased Internet usage means that even more people will actually launch their own websites and that web hosting services will clearly be busier than ever in 2017.
The Importance of Web Hosting Services
Even though eye-popping colors, helpful features and overall good design won’t hurt your website, modern consumers are usually more worried about the speed of your site than anything else. According to Moz, Google even rewards lightning-fast websites with higher search rankings.
So let’s say that you choose to start an eCommerce business – website speed is even more important, because research from the Aberdeen Group has shown that even a one-second load delay can cause a 7% decrease in conversion rates and up to 11% fewer page views.
There are some things you can tweak to improve your website’s loading speed, but in reality, your site’s speed, stability and even security is mostly determined by a single factor – the host you’re using to power your site.
Different Types of Hosting
Now, there are a lot of options when it comes to web hosting, but it mainly boils down to four main hosting solutions:
- Virtual Private Serer (VPS)
- Cloud Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Shared Hosting
And the question is, of course, which one should you choose? Well, for some people, this can be rather tricky, but it all comes down to one simple question – what are you going to use it for?
Are you setting up an eCommerce store? Are running a blog perhaps? Some people simply want to have a personal website that contains their portfolio and a couple of other personal information.
Also, your choice largely depends on your budget, because dedicated hosting (where all resources belong to you) costs far more than the other three. Shared hosting on the other hand is far more cost-effective, but it has certain limitations as well.
Shared Hosting – Who is it for?
This is perhaps the most popular (and the most well-known) hosting plan in the world. In addition to being cheap (prices go from $2 per month to $25 per month), this hosting plan is, in most cases, pretty easy to setup and use.
With this type of hosting, you will share all your resources like CPU time, disk space, memory and data, with a number of different sites. And while in some rare instances, when some site is using a lot resources, your site speed may go down a notch.
But if that even happens all you need is to get in touch with the hosting support team, and explain your problem to them. And if the problem can’t be solved immediately, they will simply move your site to another server.
And What are the Downsides of Shared Hosting?
Of course, the biggest con of Shared Hosting is that there’s more than one site on the same server. Some hosts even allow more than a 1,000 sites to run on one server, which prevents you from having full control over the server or its performance.
Now, one limitation people also like to mention when it comes to Shared Hosting is protection – or lack thereof. Shared hosting sometimes in not compatible with some security protocols, and if one website is compromised on your server, then your website too can be easily compromised.
However, reliable hosting services like BlueHost put up protections for their clients, and provide them with technical support to ensure that their site won’t be compromised, in case something goes wrong anywhere down the line.
The Bottom Line
Simply put, if you’re running a large organization, and if the money isn’t an issue, you should definitely go for another hosting option. On the other hand, if you’re running a small business, or you simply want a personal website with contact information, you should go for shared hosting.
So it’s up to you to decide what your personal needs are. And if you want to find out more about different hosting companies, you should look into sites like Hosting Facts, and check out the pros and cons of a number of hosting providers.
