It is often overlooked, but web hosting is one of the key components for a website to be successful. Choosing the best web hosting is also critical to improving the effectiveness of your Search Engine Optimization and increase sales. Some years ago, selecting a hosting company was more simple than today. At the entry level, most people prefer shared hosting while for business, they prefer using the managed hosting services. Some users opt for virtual private servers (VPS) usually referred to as “cloud servers” because of the computational power needed and the virtualization technology. The other option is a dedicated server which is also called co-location, that makes sure your site is accessed from the same IP address.
Website’s loading speed is critical to the success of any Internet site. In fact, Google started factoring the loading time of websites into its ranking. If your site is one of those using search engine optimization and subject to search engine traffic, it is important to consider loading time when choosing an excellent hosting service. WordPress web hosting offers various types of hosting solutions that depend on the services you are want.
Shared Hosting
You might have heard about shared good choice that offer packages if you have a website. They act like “public transporters” of the hosting world. They have extremely low hosting fees, a lot of congestion and little flexibility. A high traffic on your site leads to slow loading speed and response. Sometimes the visitors of you site can’t access the service due to limited bandwidth. The reason such hosting causes slow response is that the only way to offer the package is through putting a lot of websites on the same server.
It all goes down to business and cost of running the business. If you compare a shared hosting where many sites are managed by one server with a dedicated server which only deals with one site, the performance of the sites has to be different. However, it is a cost-effective solution for starting a business, and you can run all kinds of scripts on these accounts. The hosting service is best suited for bloggers who don’t need much bandwidth or a website that is only used for information purposes and targeting a small group of visitors.
Managed Hosting
The traditional way of managed hosting was about hardware and operating system management for separate boxes. However, the new type of managed hosting is based on applications. Today, firms hosting applications are popping up almost every day, and WordPress is just one of them. In fact, WordPress has become the go-to content management system and the go-to web application platform for many website developers.
WordPress shared managed hosting is similar to shared hosting but more of a new generation of shared hosting. Instead of allowing everyone to run all kinds of scripts, they only allow one. The companies know all about their products and they have fined tuned their machines and operating systems for it. Also, they have a dedicated support who knows the ins and outs of it. The managed WordPress web hosting deals with back-end tasks when running a WordPress blog to ensure you don’t have to. The role of the company is to make sure that you focus on what matters.
Some of the services provided include support that is not limited to problems with hosting account, security, regarding keeping the WordPress instances up to date, examining the presence of malicious plugins and themes, and identifying gaps that could help hackers interfere with your website. Another important service provided is catching because WordPress hosts have their catching system. Backups service is sometimes needed especially when the server’s hard drive gives up making your data not recoverable. Managed WordPress hosts provide the users with backup for their data regularly to ensure they don’t lose anything if the worst happens. The hosting service is good for people who run their business on WordPress.
Virtual Private Servers
As cloud computing continues to become more popularized, and virtualized servers are also following the same trend too. They are offered at a fraction of the cost for a dedicated server, and it is possible to get your own (virtual) machine and make it fit your exact needs. One of the disadvantages is that there is no support and many times you have to do things yourself. Also, it is considered to have a poor performance because hardware resources are shared between many virtual machines.
A fully managed VPS has all the required software, the operating system is kept updated, and support proactively monitors the server to minimize the downtime. For obvious reasons, the price of the services goes up with the requirements. In overall, VPS is a cheap way to get much flexibility as you need especially with the option to deploy the popular software packages in one click.
Dedicated Servers
Subscribing for a dedicated server is almost like VPS. However, instead of sharing the pool of hardware and software resources with other users via virtualization, you can use all the dedicated resources for your website only. The dedicated servers are used by companies that run large applications that are accessed or depended on by millions of clients, and they need high computational power to process the transactions.
The disadvantage of these servers is hardware failures which when they fail without another dedicated server to handle the traffic, visitors would have to face denial of service requests when the server is inaccessible. If the provider does not have backups whatsoever, it could put your site in a very awkward situation where visitors can’t access the services. Therefore, a dedicated server is not good for an everyday website owner. However, it is useful for businesses that require high bandwidth such as financial institutions.
Conclusion
When it comes to website hosting, you have quite a lot of options to consider depending on the services you are want. The different types of hosting offered by WordPress can only be effective if you use the right hosting that fits the services provided by your website.