What is Hosting?
A website’s cost of creation is not everything, every owner of a website must have a domain or an online name under which the website will be visible on the Internet and hosting or a place where files from the website and database will be stored. Without it, the website simply won’t work.
To launch an online store or a website, you need so-called hosting, hosting is a dedicated part of the server, a physical computer located in a data center, its task is to serve websites, store www files, databases, etc.
What do You Need Hosting For?
Some people mean by “website” just the domain name, and that’s it. The domain name is only the right to use a specific online name, and nothing more. To build a website, you actually need hosting on which you will be able to upload files of the CMS script or HTML files, unless in case of a website built in HTML, uploading previously created files is the only task (you can create such a website offline without having purchased hosting yet) , but in case of CMS, i.e. content management system, and uploading files alone won’t be enough, you will also need to create a database on which the CMS will work.
Hosting is also a place where mailboxes will be started, probably you’ll be interested in starting at least one mailbox linked to your domain name, e.g. info@yourdomain.pl , it’s natural that you would want to send all correspondence from an address associated with your domain because on your website (assuming you plan to launch the company website, i.e. service-based) will have your offer and you’ll want people receiving mail from You to see Your website’s address already before opening the message sent by You.
As you can see, hosting is necessary to launch a website. Hosting is usually registered at the time of domain purchase; it’s a natural consequence of this purchase because a domain has no reason for existence without hosting or a place where files referring to the domain name will be stored.
What Kind of Hosting Should I Choose?
There are many hosting companies on the market, as well as intermediaries who buy only part of the physical server or the entire server or servers just to resell them with profit from a hosting company’s equipment.
When looking for good hosting, you should pay attention to several very important parameters; hosting can be divided into several types:
1. Classic shared hosting
– HDD (hosting on classical hard drives)
– SSD (hosting on ultra-fast silicon “hard drives”)
2. VPS hosting
3. Dedicated hosting
4. Cloud hosting (in the cloud)
ad1. Classic shared hosting is a dedicated fragment of a physical server; in most cases, the hosting company guarantees only a part of the allocated disk space expressed in GBs, but not MBs. Hosting VPS is already an investment of at least 100-150 PLN per month.
Dedicated hosting is a service for those who want to have their own, very powerful server and are willing to pay accordingly (from several hundred PLNs upwards). Cloud hosting, on the other hand, its cost depends only on how intensively you use its resources; it can be as little as 500 PLN per year but can also be significantly higher.
I Know Companies That Have Chosen Incorrect Hosting Solution Without Knowing Its Implications
There are cases of companies that have not known what kind of implications a wrong choice of hosting solution brings and, unfortunately, they met the problem of sudden traffic growth on their website and inability to handle it. For example:
A company X had a TV program without knowing completely the risks involved in such promotion. The program ended with an address of their website.
The website received an avalanche of visitors who wanted to learn more about the offer; for hours, they saw an error message instead of the offer itself.
Missed Potential and How to Avoid It
I know many companies that would give anything for such free advertising because it was a TV program about them and their innovative solutions, not paid advertising.
The cost of creating a website is not everything.
Cheap hosting costing only several hundred PLN a year has no chance to handle a large traffic flow and company X lost the opportunity to generate significant sales through that TV program.
You Should Be Aware That:
– The cheapest shared hosting can’t efficiently handle more than dozens of concurrent users on the site; in case of hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands people trying to open the same page at the same time, the effect may be a single-page error message.
