Starting your own website has never been easier than it is today. There are plenty of companies out there that offer a range of different hosting packages to their customers. If you are interested in starting your own website, there are many different things that you need to consider. First of all, you need to decide whether you are starting a blog or your own business website. Your whole approach will be based on whether you are starting a business website or a simple blog or content focused website. For instance, business website owners have to decide the amount of money that they are going to invest in their website.
Registering the domain is probably the easiest part. The next step is to build the website and then buy a hosting package. In order to build your website, you will need to hire a talented website designer and developer. The designer will take down a few details about what you are going to use the website for, as well as any particular requirements that you might have about the website’s appearance. Then, he/she will show you a few templates to choose from.
Once the website has been designed, the next step is to install a content management system. If you want to attract traffic to your website, you will need to update it with new content regularly. Using a robust content management system is important in that regard. Content management systems such as Joomla and WordPress are extremely popular today, and make it easy for webmasters to view everything that’s on their website.
Before your website can go live, you need to buy a hosting plan. For an average blog, a simple hosting plan will do just fine. Most blogs generally get a few thousand visitors per day. Even if the number of visitors on your blog is higher, you don’t have much to worry about simply because textual content doesn’t take a lot of space on the servers. However, if you are running a content-rich website or are looking to provide service solutions to your customers, you need to decide whether you want to rent a dedicated server and managed hosting, or whether you wish to buy a shared hosting package.
How Are Websites Hosted?
Most people don’t really know much about dedicated/managed hosting or other types of hosting packages. Here’s a brief description of different types of hosting plans.
Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting. Companies that offer hosting services generally have their own servers. If not, they rent servers from data centres and then offer hosting services to customers. A server is simply a very powerful computer with lots of storage space. The data for each different website is uploaded to the server and remains on the hard drive.
Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting, simply because numerous websites can be hosted on a single server. The storage space you get will vary depending on which package you buy. However, there are a few downsides of shared hosting. Because there are other websites hosted on the same server, if a virus gets into one website, it might bring the whole server down.
Needless to say, all the websites hosted on the server will go down until the virus is cleaned or the backup is restored. This can be a serious problem for people who are looking for maximum customisation and uptime on their website. Another problem with shared hosting is DDoS attacks. Even though hosting companies take all necessary measures in order to make sure that their servers remain protected, hackers often find loopholes and exploit them to bring down servers. Distributed denial of service attacks can down websites for several days, thus causing serious damage to your business.
A dedicated host is one in which only one website is hosted on the whole server. This gives you an unprecedented amount of freedom when it comes to managing your website. Because the whole website is hosted on a single server, you can install any antivirus of your choice, and you can also install plugins and other add-ons of your choice.
The reason why most organisations and large corporations prefer dedicated hosting packages is because they are a lot more flexible than standard hosting packages. For starters, the organisation can choose which operating system they would want on the server. They can also decide the hardware they want on the server, and the management will make arrangements accordingly.
However, this additional freedom comes at a steep cost: dedicated hosting packages are considerably more expensive than shared hosting packages. That is why you need first to perform a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether dedicated hosting is a wise idea for your website or not.
Ideally, dedicated hosting is a great option for online businesses that want maximum customisation and flexibility. These packages are designed for scalability and reliability, and offer maximum convenience to business owners to decide any specific hosting requirements that they might have.
Many online business owners have very specific requirements regarding IT support, security features, and storage. With a managed hosting package, you can decide all of this on your own, and the hosting company will comply with your requirements. Dedicated servers are most commonly housed in data centres and are connected to KVM switches to work properly. Because they require maintenance round the clock, these data centres usually employ a separate maintenance team that’s available at all times.
Which One Should You Buy?
This mainly depends on what you need your website for. If you are interested in running a simple content-rich website to provide information and news to your visitors, managed hosting isn’t such a good idea. However, if you are interested in running your own online business and are looking to scale it within the next few months, managed hosting might be the best way to go.