When you decide to launch your own website there are two primary things you need to do.
First you need to choose your domain name. See our recent blog — Choosing a Domain Name — to learn more about selecting a great domain name.
Next you will need to choose your web hosting package.
When it comes to web hosting, the choices you have are virtually limitless. Whether the hosting company you choose is large or small, there are several key factors to consider.
In the early days of the internet, domain registrars and web hosting companies were two very separate businesses. It was common practice for new startups to register their domain with one of the major domain registrars, then setup their hosting with an entirely different hosting company.
There are still many situations when we might purchase a domain from a domain registrar, and then just sit on it for a while as we plot, plan, and brainstorm our idea further. This is a perfectly normal thing for a lot of creative entrepreneurs to do, just to get things started. In some cases, they might register a domain and simply have it re-direct somewhere else for a while (like your main social media account for instance).
In most situations though, you will likely be purchasing your web hosting from the same place, at the same time, as your domain name.
What Does a Web Host Provide?
Your web host will provide the physical server space where your website files will actually live. This server will have the underlying IP address, which is a unique numerical value in a format such as 192.0.2.1. Your human-readable domain name is then mapped to your server IP address using DNS or the Domain Name System.
If you don’t get a hosting package right away, your domain name will just go nowhere, or possibly to a default “parked domain” page provided by the registrar. For this reason, it’s extremely convenient when web hosting companies offer domain registration together with a hosting package.
For most beginner websites, you won’t need to stress too much about the technical intricacies, and you certainly don’t need to blow your budget on the biggest hosting package right away. There’s a time and a reason to upgrade to the more expensive package. In the beginning though, you typically only need a few gigabytes of storage space, a modest amount of bandwidth and a handful of additional features.
Naturally, for more elaborate websites with more content, more traffic, more file downloads, more audio/video, etc – you will need much more space and bandwidth than a typical startup website.
In the web hosting market at large, there are a number of platforms and cloud technologies available to choose from. First of all, there are several increasingly popular all-in-one drag-and-drop website builder services on the market, including Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, and a number of others. These are closed-source proprietary platforms, and can come at a steep price. Even so, these options can be ideal for some non-technical business owners who simply want to get their site online as fast as possible.
However, we’ll talk more about the pros and cons of these services later. Right now, we mainly want to focus on professional hosting options that allow us to directly build and manage our sites from the ground up, with virtually any framework or content management system we want.
Let’s look at the common options most web hosting services will offer you.
Common Web Hosting Options
There are several types of servers that are used for different purposes, including industry specific setups. With extremely rare exceptions, these are usually some version of either Windows Servers or Linux Servers, both of which come in a variety of configurations.
In the modern commercial web hosting market, you will almost always find the most affordable, versatile and scalable hosting services are running some version of the tech stack known as LAMP — a Linux operating system, running Apache server management, with a MySQL database, and PHP as the main web page scripting language.
Many LAMP servers have adopted CloudLinux, and use LiteSpeed as a “drop in” replacement of Apache (same general functionality just faster) and Maria DB, a companion drop-in for MySQL (same functionality but also slightly faster).
Within the wonderful world of LAMPs, you will typically find FIVE main types of web hosting services, which can all be configured and deployed in various ways, for various types of businesses:
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
- Managed Hosting
Shared hosting is usually perfect for most startups. The term “shared hosting” means you are sharing an allotted portion of a much larger hosting server with a number of other websites. By sharing bandwidth, power and memory resources among a larger number of sites, hosting providers can offer dramatically reduced costs to the individual site owners. This is the most common way for small to mid-sized operations to get started, especially when the host is diligent about proper resource management and good with customer support.
In some instances, you may want to purchase a Dedicated IP address from your web host, while technically still using the “shared” hosting service. You can do this to help manage server resources and bandwidth better, as well as boost your site security as you begin getting more traffic, and even improve email deliverability. I’ve found this is particularly useful if you are starting up a new eCommerce site.
VPS, or “virtual private server” hosting is ideal for more advanced mid-sized businesses, app developers, or mid-sized video streaming or eCommerce operations that may need more significant bandwidth and memory resources. With a VPS you are still leasing a similar type of shared server space from the host, but with “virtualization” technology installed at the OS level. Each VPS account is partitioned from the rest, simulating a more dedicated server environment. You are then able to have guaranteed resources available such as specific memory, disk space, CPU cores, and so on. You also get a much higher level of admin control on the backend of your server, which is perfect for more advanced web development and software installation.
Dedicated servers are much more expensive and require a significant amount of time and resources to maintain. These are typically intended for larger enterprise level businesses, or highly advanced app development that require completely dedicated and secured server hardware, software and bandwidth resources. While the web host may offer preconfigured dedicated server options, and remotely house your dedicated server in their datacenter (basically just making sure the power stays on and the data continues to flow) pretty much everything else about your dedicated server must be configured and maintained by you and your own team. In some cases it may be “managed” dedicated hosting where the web host will more actively help you maintain core server updates as well, but not much else. You are basically fully responsible for every aspect of everything.
Reseller Hosting is basically a special kind of VPS package, typically used by full time web professionals. The server comes with licensed web hosting software that is pre-installed and allows the owner to register domains and create hosting packages through their own white-labeled business. Reseller packages can be scaled as needed in a number of ways, and are ideal for freelance web designers and web agencies of all sizes, allowing them to bill clients for domains, hosting, and even any design, maintenance or other services they may need.
Managed Hosting is increasingly popular, particularly in the realm of high-end WordPress sites. In some ways this sort of bridges the gap between self-managed hosting versus all-in-one SaaS services like Wix and others. If you have the budget, this can be a great option if you don’t want to mess with the installation, configuration, and ongoing maintenance of your chosen CMS or other application. This can free up you and your team to focus on your site content, sales, and marketing, and leave the web support to the pros.
What are the Specs?
Modern web technology (and terminology) is constantly changing and evolving. But across all of these main hosting options, there are still certain specs you should always keep an eye out for.
Storage Space
Once you narrow down your choices, you’re ready to start comparing their plans. There will be plenty of tech jargon about all the features of course, but you first want to consider how much storage space you need.
It may surprise a lot of people, but 5-10 GB of shared server space is usually way more than enough for most small to mid-sized business websites to get started. Even a lot of eCommerce sites can start here and upgrade later as needed. As long as you format and optimize your images and other content properly, you can actually do some really sophisticated stuff for a website with well under 10GB of server space.
Of course, more elaborate online shops or music sites with a lot of downloadable items, will certainly need more space. 20GB for example would probably be a good starting point for an active musician or label website that directly streams or sells a lot of MP3s, or other downloadable content. You can upgrade as you go from there as you build out your catalog.
For decades, the only hardware storage option was traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). This mechanical magnetic storage method is prone to all kinds of problems and should be completely avoided at this point. Surprisingly, some older hosting services still use this technology. Most hosting providers today use Solid-State Drives (SSD) for storage, which is strongly recommended across the board. Even better is NVMe storage, which is basically an even faster version of SSD.
Bandwidth
More content, bigger files, and more downloadable/streaming content translates to more bandwidth. 5-10GB of bandwidth is usually plenty in the very beginning for smaller sites. While it is not a scientific comparison at all, I generally like to think of 5-10GB as representing about 5,000-10,000 unique site visitors per month who are actively engaging with the content of a fairly common beginner website.
For many hosting services, once your bandwidth usage exceeds a certain amount, there will be extra charges that can be quite substantial — show-stopping even! Some hosting services however will allow occasional overages, or help you upgrade to an “unmetered” plan if it looks like you’re ready.
Bandwidth usually only becomes an issue as your site grows in popularity. However, your bandwidth limits may sneak up on you if your users are downloading larger file sizes, or if you’re directly embedding self-hosted audio or video. If video is going to be the focus of your site content, then you’ll either need to embed it from YouTube, Rumble, or similar third party video services, or otherwise look into more expensive and elaborate VPS or dedicated hosting plans.
You should also be aware of your bandwidth limitations if you plan to do a big public promotion for your site, and suddenly get a massive influx of new traffic. Over the years, I’ve watched countless startup sites crash in live-time when the owners initially launch a big online marketing campaign, or even more common, they suddenly have an opportunity to appear on a popular podcast or radio show. Millions of viewers/listeners suddenly try to go to their site and all that traffic gets backed up and crashes the server — all because they didn’t allot enough bandwidth ahead of time.
As I’ve mentioned, most good web hosting services provide easy options for you to upgrade (or even downgrade) both your server storage space and your bandwidth as you go. This way, while you’re still learning the system for the first few months or so, you can save yourself a little money and save the hosting business some precious bandwidth resources.
SSL
Represented by “https” in the URL, along with the little padlock icon you see in the address bar of your browser, SSL is another feature you will absolutely want to have on any hosting package you get. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and, in short, it’s the standard encryption technology for keeping a website’s connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems (i.e., an eCommerce website and the customer’s web browser). This prevents criminals (or governments in some cases) from directly reading and modifying any information while in transit, including potential personal details, payment info, and so on.
In the early stages of launching your first website, most people will not need to worry too much about the technicals surrounding SSL. But for the record, there are a number of options for SSL certificates, including DV (Domain Verification), OV (organization verification) and EV (extended verification). DV certificates are the easiest and most common for beginners, while obtaining OV and EV might be more suited for larger enterprise-level businesses since they tend to be a more complicated process, require more detailed business verification, and can take several days to receive.
If you’re doing a more complex website, particularly with various subdomains, you may also want to look into purchasing a Wildcard SSL certificate (available in both DV and OV options) to further secure your site. All these types of SSL certificates are typically Single-domain certificates, but there are also Multi-domain certificates for large organizations that may run literally hundreds of domains.
Some web hosts will charge rather large extra fees for any type of SSL certificate. Luckily these days, most quality web hosting companies are now able to use a service called Let’s Encrypt to AUTOMATICALLY create the most common single-domain wildcard SSL certificates for their clients’ websites — FOR FREE!
Email and FTP Accounts
When launching your own site, you naturally want to have access to your own custom email accounts as well. You will also want to be able to create FTP accounts for your webmaster or development team. Since FTP accounts are typically associated with an existing email address, email and FTP account options tend to go hand in hand. Surprisingly, some major web hosting services do not provide custom email accounts or multiple FTP accounts as part of their regular packages.
For most beginner hosting scenarios, starting with about 10 email addresses is plenty to cover the main site owners and any basic administrative purposes. For most web hosts you should be able to easily scale up from there as needed.
Once your hosting package is created, you should be able to log into your hosting control panel, create your email addresses, and obtain the details necessary to setup your accounts in such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or other dedicated email applications. For most Linux servers, you will also usually find the option to use built-in services such as WebMail, where you can directly login to your email accounts through your web browser, much like you would with services like Gmail and others.
Site Building Tools
In the early days of web hosting, the services offered were fairly raw. You would typically have to build your own site from the ground up with your own code, or manually install your own content management systems (CMS). Until more recent years, the options for drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page builders was extremely limited.
At this point however, almost any Linux based web host will offer convenient tools in the client control panel to quickly and easily install WordPress, Drupal, or other CMS platforms. Look for this at a bare minimum when shopping for a web host. Along with these options will come tools for making regular backups and staging environments. This also makes your site portable, should the need ever arise that you need to migrate to a different web hosting service.
Increasingly, even small independent web hosting providers are now able to offer cutting-edge site builders such as SiteJet Builder. Tools such as this make it so non-technical site owners don’t have to be trapped at one of the bigger corporate site builder platforms, and can easily build out their own professional site while saving a sizeable chunk of change.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Different web hosting services may use different site building tools from one to the next. Sometimes these tools are included free of charge as part of your hosting package. In other cases, the host may charge extra for it as an add-on feature. As we noted earlier, sometimes site builder tools are completely proprietary to the specific host, such as Wix or Squarespace. But In ALL cases, it is important to keep in mind that the chosen site builder tool itself is the very engine that drives your entire site layout, your stylesheets, the underlying Javascript, and everything else. With this in mind, if you build your site with a particular site builder tool on one hosting service, and you need to migrate to a new host – MAKE CERTAIN that your new host supports that exact same tool. Otherwise, you will be looking at completely rebuilding your site all over again. For example, if you build on Wix, you cannot simply export your raw HTML files and expect to work with it the same way on a totally new host that doesn’t use their proprietary site builder software.
Pricing
When choosing your web host, you will naturally be considering the price. This will vary widely across the board, so you’ll want to factor in all the specs we’ve discussed to maximize your budget.
Larger hosting providers will typically charge more for their base-level hosting packages. They often charge extra for things like SSL, email accounts, or various site building tools as well.
Smaller services on the other hand will usually be more affordable, and potentially more versatile with their regular hosting features.
In almost every case though, you will save a significant amount of money if you sign up for a year or more, rather than going month to month.
Conclusion
Take your time researching various web hosts. If you’re on a tight budget, don’t just go straight for the cheapest option. There may be hidden fees or multi-year contracts that make up for the crazy cheap $2.95/month price, or they might lack certain features or support.
If money is no issue for you, congratulations — but don’t jump straight to the most popular, most expensive household brand name hosting provider just because you can. You might be getting over charged for services you don’t need, and you might not get the kind of personalized service and support you deserve.
Look for a practical balance between your budget and the main features that make sense for you and your site. Check the social media of different hosting companies to see how they interact with customers and industry peers, and read customer reviews where available.
