Making a website for your business is always quite a story. Away from all the fancy proceedings of choosing a domain name and tweaking innovative design ideas, there lies a cumbersome yet integral process of choosing the right hosting technology for your wordpress websites.
The reason why it is not a fashionable practice is because it requires a deeper understanding of your needs and the available technologies that match perfectly to your purpose. There is a lot of literature available on the platform, framework and design your website should be built upon. But there is very little available about how and what should be the ideal hosting technology for your websites.
What is Website Hosting?
Hosting a website is very much like how these phrases sound. There is a place out there where your website is hosted. You can own or rent this place to facilitate anyone who visits your website. You can surely expand upon the guidelines of website hosting but to sum it up in simpler terms, your website is your furniture and your hosting platform is the house you move into.
These spaces are in the form of physical or virtual servers that host all your data, style sheets, codes and content in an efficient manner. Every time users visit your website, they are practically visiting this physical space where your website and its content is placed.
What it Means To WordPress Websites?
WordPress websites comprise a huge chunk on the internet. There are more websites powered by WordPress than any other framework or platform out there. It is obvious that any technology so powerful was always going to have a dedicated service at its disposal. Hosting services for WordPress websites are specifically designed to have optimum functionality and speed for WordPress websites.
A WordPress website can be hosted on various different hosting techniques. The main difference between hosting other websites and a WordPress website is that WordPress hosting offers upgraded server resources like CPU, memory space and database connections. Just like how using WordPress comes with its own advantages and a price tag, specific hosting for WordPress websites too comes with a certain price tag attached to it. However it does result in improved performances and higher speeds of a WordPress website.
Types of Hosting Technologies for WordPress Websites
Just like the methods to build websites, the techniques of hosting a website too have seen a range of evolution over the last few years. However it is very likely that an agency that offers you wordpress website designing services is also going to help you out with its hosting very effectively. The criteria could be anything from speed to maintenance or even cost of subscriptions.
Here are some technologies you can host your WordPress website on.
One of the most commonly used modes of hosting, shared hosting is a concept where multiple websites share a physical space and its resources. This is perhaps the most economical way of hosting a WordPress website. All the domains on the shared space share the usage of all the resources from the server space like the memory and processing unit.
Shared hosting is considered to be best suited for websites that do not expect a lot of traffic on them. Since the space is shared, if multiple websites get large traffics at the same time, your website may face some issues regarding the speed and performance.
Dedicated
Dedicated hosting is when you occupy a space in the server that is dedicated only for your website. This space is solely for the usage of your website and no other domain can be hosted in the same space even if it has the spare space or capacity. This gives a lot more power to the website owners as they no longer have to bear the uncertainty of traffic surges and slower performances as a result.
Dedicated hosting is an inexpensive affair. It will cost you a lot but in return you will get a dedicated space that will facilitate higher traffic. This type of hosting is best suited to websites that are more likely to have huge numbers of users and ones that cannot afford to have compromised performances or speed.
VPS
One budget friendly solution to the traffic and performance uncertainty of shared hosting is Virtual Private Servers. These are dedicated spaces but virtual ones for your website. This type of hosting is thought to be best suited for websites that expect moderately good traffic but not too much that it needs dedicated hosting.
VPS works on virtualization technology. This essentially means that you will have a virtual layer over the actual space on the server where all your calls will be fractioned. With VPS, you get the same root level access as the dedicated server but with a much reduced price.
Cloud
One of the most advanced and futuristic ways to host a WordPress website is cloud hosting. This works when a service provider has a network of computers connected to each other. This technology manages virtual servers and stores website data in an asynchronous manner. In this, a call for a certain value waits for a server and its resources to respond. If there is a delay, the system moves on to another server and its resources. This way if one server is down, your website gets a return value call with other servers functioning right.
With cloud hosting, your website can call for as many resources as it wants without you having to permanently own or rent these resources. This concept is largely scalable as you can ask for larger resources at any given point.
Managed
Managed hosting is a very popular concept these days. With managed hosting, a service provider lends you all the technical support and management that is required to host your website on shared or dedicated servers. Matters such as software and hardware set up, maintenance, patching, monitoring, technical support and updating are assisted by the service provider. Hence you never have to worry about the operational aspects of hosting a website after acquiring their services.
Decentralized
One of the most promising and sustainable ways to host a website is to store it in a decentralized manner. In decentralized technology, everything is stored in a decentralized way. I.e. over thousands of different shared storage spaces instead of just one. This type of storage is done through blockchain coding and it is immutable.
Since codes written on a blockchain network cannot be altered. This concept is also regarded as the most secure way of hosting your website. It is practically impossible to hack thousands of storage points or to have a simultaneous outage in performance. This type of hosting also makes your website free from motivated guidelines, algorithms and forced censorships.
Before deciding upon the technology or the concept of hosting your website. It is essential that you gauge the possible traffic on your website and the overall purpose you want to serve to host that said website. There is a great deal of flexibility in all these hosting plans. Hence change of hosting plans or concepts is convenient at any given point.
Conclusion
There are many popular and futuristic hosting methods for websites out there. There are dedicated services for WordPress websites as well that optimize the loading speed and content with specific emphasis. The key however is the budget. Hosting a website with full control over it is not an inexpensive practice. More control always results in higher hosting costs. It is an industry recommendation that smaller websites with moderate traffic on it. It can work fine with shrink budgets and shared hosting. Websites that work on a large scale have to opt for dedicated hosting. If you really want state of the art security and performances. Opting for cloud or decentralized hosting could be your way.
