What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is where your website and all of its elements are stored to be shown to users when a request is made. This typically happens on a server. To better explain this, I’d like to use an analogy. Think of your web host like a house where your website lives. In this house, your website stores all of its files like images and code, similar to how you keep all of your belongings in your own home.
Why Do You Need Web Hosting?
You hire a hosting company in order to gain space on a server. Without web hosting and space on a server, your website will not be accessible.
A server is a computer that connects outside users to your website from anywhere in the world. Every website’s goal is to gain as much traffic as possible and in order for this to occur you need to ensure that you have reliable hosting with a great server. If you don’t have reliable hosting, you may risk downtime, slow load times, or even web hacking which is harmful to a website.
What Types of Hosting are Available?
There are many types of hosting available for business owners to use for their website, however, there are typically four common types of hosting that are used. They include shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, and cloud hosting.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is when other websites share space on the server with you. To go back to our living situation analogy, think of this like an apartment rather than a house.
There will be multiple websites on the server and it will have to handle multiple requests for each website. This type of hosting is typically cheaper, but not always the best. With multiple sites demanding requests, you can run into issues with speed. This type of hosting is typically only valid if you know your site will never handle a lot of traffic. For example a local restaurant.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is the exact opposite of shared hosting. By purchasing dedicated hosting you are securing space on a server that only your site will live. There will be no issues competing with other websites on your server for requests and it’s honestly one of the best routes you can go when it comes to web hosting. If you go with the right company, it’s rare you will run into any issues with your own dedicated hosting plan.
VPS Hosting
VPS is short for virtual private hosting. VPS hosting uses virtualization technology to provide your website with dedicated space on a server with multiple users. It’s different from shared hosting.
It will be more stable and less risky than a shared hosting package, but will also be much cheaper than securing your own dedicated server. You get your own dedicated space on a server shared with other users, but your space will always be secured. This option would be perfect for websites with medium-sized traffic.
Tim Koster with Clever Creations weighed in on his experience with VPS. “We find that managing a VPS is a bit more technical than dealing with shared hosting, but it is still perfectly manageable, even without previous experience.”
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is another alternative to shared or VPS hosting. Your resources will be stored in the cloud where multiple servers exist. Your site may bounce around to different servers in the cloud based on requests that are occurring for other sites in the cloud, and where there is space available. This is another great option for websites with small to medium daily traffic.
What are the Top Web Hosting Companies?
There are a lot of web hosting providers out there offering their services so you will not fall short on hosting options, but a few stand out from the rest. I have worked in the web hosting and digital marketing industry for 10+ years and have experience a majority of the companies I am going to talk about on this list. In no particular order, let’s get to it.
WP Engine
Price Range: $25 – $245 per month
Average Rating: 4.6/5
This is our personal favorite here at LSEO. We partner with WP Engine for all of the web projects we work on. The best part about WP Engine is that it is fully managed. That means if there are issues, you can always turn to the support team at WP Engine to fix them.
Jeff Romero with OctivDigital told us that WP Engine is typically something he recommends for larger sites. “For e-commerce websites selling products, they need more space and memory limits to accommodate additional resources. For this, we recommend a robust plan through WP Engine, where plenty of data is allowed, backups occur regularly and support is offered 24/7.”
We prefer WP Engine for dedicated hosting, especially for WordPress sites which we build a lot of!
Digital Ocean
Price Range: $5 – $2000+ per month
Average Rating: 4.9/5
Digital Ocean is one of the best hosting companies out there in my opinion. Digital Ocean has the ability to host small websites all the way up to very large websites that need multiple terabytes of storage. They are one of the best cloud options available.
Akram Tariq Khan, Cofounder of YourLibaas, gave us his opinion after using DigitalOcean for 28 months. “Digitalocean is the best for the following reasons: The price is competitive and a lot cheaper compared to large cloud hosting providers like Amazon EC2 & Microsoft Azure. They offer a complete ecosystem with load balancers, Kubernetes, automated backups, auto-scaling, and so on. The setup is easy and the API has integrations with most hosting management platforms.”
If you’re not interested in our preferred method of WP Engine, check out Digital Ocean.
SiteGround
Price Range: $6.99 – $240 per month
Average Rating: 4.1/5
SiteGround is another hosting provider I have personal experience with. I have to say SiteGround without a doubt has the best customer service. They will always be there to help you. SiteGround could get a little complicated based on their backend system and CPanel, but as long as you have some sort of development chops, you should be able to manage.
Mudassir Ahmed, founder of Blogging Explained swears by SiteGround! “I have been with Siteground for 2+ years and this is the service I recommend with confidence. Qualified tech support, top-notch performance, better speed, easy-to-use hosting account and whatnot! “
SiteGround is also relatively cheap and reliable. If you are looking for shared hosting, check out SiteGround.
Bluehost
Price Range: $25 – $245 per month
Average Rating: 4.6/5
Bluehost is the perfect host for beginners. I’ve personally used this hosting provider for personal projects that I’ve had to complete for family or friends. It’s relatively cheap and it gets the job done. Some of the packages even allow you to host multiple domains if you have a few sites you are looking to launch.
Ekta with Tia Says shared their review with us.. “The best web hosting is Bluehost. I love Bluehost’s customer service. They are extremely friendly, patient and always eager to help. I won’t lie but I am not a tech expert, infact sometimes I don’t know silly things. But I know Bluehost support team is always there for me.”
If shared hosting isn’t in your plans or because your site has high traffic, check out their VPS hosting.
Inmotion
Price Range: $5.99 – $100 per month
Average Rating: 4.1/5
Inmotion has the best VPS hosting if you are looking to go that route. They are known for their ability to host websites via a VPS. You can secure VPS hosting with Inmotion for about $30 per month.
They are also a great shared hosting provider for Windows.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Price Range: Contact AWS
Average Rating: 4.1/5
There is no denying the power behind an Amazon supported product. AWS is one of the best, if not the best hosting providers available to users right now. It’s the best cloud option, especially for websites that are highly visited. You will have rock-solid security and customer support with AWS.
Stewart Dunlop with PPC Genius swears by AWS. “I have used many web hosting applications but the one that I found was most reliable and secure with an exceptional page load speed was Amazon AWS. You would require a bit more work to set up your website initially than something like single-server service providers, but if you want the ability to scale quickly, efficiently, and cheaply, AWS is the most reliable option around.”
The only downside is you don’t really know how much it will cost until you contact them.
A2 Hosting
Price Range: $2.99 – $100 per month
Average Rating: 4.4/5
This is another option for fast and reliable shared hosting. However, they offer a wide variety of hosting solutions. They also pound their chest on their ability to offer dedicated windows server hosting.
The shared hosting is relatively cheap, like really cost-effective. The dedicated hosting is about $100 per month.
So, What Web Hosting Plan Should I Choose?
Here I gave you some of your best options. My advice would be to take these suggestions and do some additional research to figure out the best option for you or reach out to a professional like myself at LSEO and we will lead you down the right path.
The great part about all of the recommended companies is that most come with SSL certificates, so your site should meet the proper Google standards and protocols when it comes to security.
When it comes to finding the right website hosting, it should be something that is taken seriously whether your a small business or a large one. It’s where your website is going to live, remember? You wouldn’t want to live in a shack, but rather a mansion. Treat your website the same way as it could be the means of driving your business.