For any online business, web hosting is the most essential part of creating an online presence. Basically, a web hosting service allows you to rent or buy some space on the server that keeps all your website-related files and content. This content will be accessible by the customers when they visit your website.
The below article will discuss web hosting, why to choose web hosting, features to look for web hosting, and the best hosting servers available.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting provides you various features that help in keeping your website online. It ensures your website will get a space on the server that will hold up your website and its data.
A server is a physical location, either on the computer or on the cloud, where all your files are kept. If you have a consistently managed server, it will keep your website running without interruption.
Well, server space comes with your web hosting provider. So we have to make the right choice for the web hosting provider that offers enough server space to accommodate business needs. If you avail of the best web hosting services, you do not have to worry about having technical knowledge, as everything is managed by the provider.
You will get various web hosting options in the market with various plans to meet different requirements. You can choose your plan accordingly if it suits your business needs.
Why Use a Web Hosting Server?
Today, every business is going online, which means you have to represent yourself in an innovative way to step ahead of your competitors. Of course, you do not want downtime for your website.
Having a good website hosted with the right web hosting provider is necessary. If you have a fantastic website but without proper support to manage it, there will be little to no impact of your website on the customers. You can consider the below reasons to use a web hosting server for your website:
- Having the right web hosting server will improve your website’s loading time to ensure a better user experience. This is important as a slow website will frustrate your customers, and they will move to other websites, increasing their sales.
Your website will get more conversion rates with more visitors. If the website loads faster, the customers will be engaged throughout and, hence, will stay longer. - Another reason to have the right website hosting server is to avoid downtime. A poor website tends to face more downtime than expected. If your website is not available or crashes more frequently, it will lose customer trust. Some websites crash due to heavy traffic as the server cannot manage high incoming requests simultaneously.
- Having a web hosting service ensures that your website is protected with HTTPS, securing all your customers and crucial data. Some websites offer SSL certificates that make sure all the information is encrypted while transfer. It will keep the hackers away from sensitive data.
- In case of system failure, the data can be lost from the server, which will stop the working of your websites, and you can face tremendous loss. Your web hosting provider must ensure the automatic backup of the data periodically so that you can restore the data from these backed-up files.
- Most business owners do not understand the technical details of web hosting. A good website hosting provider ensures complete support for your website in crisis and provides an instant resolution, so there is no website outage. They provide a team of professionals that will work for you round the clock.
- Opting for the right web hosting platform ensures that your website will get the best possible SEO ranking.
How does Web Hosting Work?
You need to understand the domain name before understanding how web hosting works. A domain name represents the website’s address on the internet. You recognize any website with its domain name that contains the domain name and its domain extension.
For example, “Yahoo.com,” where Yahoo is the domain name representing the brand name and “.com” is the domain extension representing the type of the business. A domain name and domain extension together form the URL for the website. Thus, getting a domain name is the first task to host your website.
Once you’ve hosted your website, the user will type the URL in the browser to search your website. The user’s computer will then send a request by browsing the website for a connection to the server where the website is being hosted.
It will also display the website content stored on the server. The server will respond to the incoming request by sending back the data to the user’s browser.
Types of Web Hosting Servers
Various types of web hosting servers are available to host your website. Choosing one depends on your business size and requirements. A web hosting can be one of the following types:
- Shared hosting is the primary and cheapest type of web hosting, suited for small-scale enterprises and beginners. This hosting allows multiple websites to share resources that may degrade the website’s performance. If one website consumes most of the resources, it may not be available for another website.
- VPS or virtual private server hosting is the advanced and costlier version of shared hosting. This creates a logical partition of the server and allocates each server to multiple websites with limited resources.
There will be no impact of one website on the other if they overuse their reserved resources. You will get better uptime and performance with this type of web hosting. - Dedicated hosting allows a website to have dedicated server resources to itself. You will get far better performance, control, uptime, flexibility, and bandwidth for your website. It is costly and comes with more features and full-blown customization.
10 Best Web Hosting Servers
Among various hosting servers available in the market, we will discuss the 10 most commonly used servers:
1. Bluehost
Bluehost is a commonly used web hosting service since 2007 with more than 300,000 websites. It was introduced in 1996 and is currently owned by Endurance International Group. The web hosting server comes with an automated setup for WordPress along with cPanel for expert users. This hosting server can handle heavy traffic efficiently.
Highlights
- Regarded highly due to its high and consistent uptime of 99.96 percent.
- Comes with many desirable features, like a free domain name, advanced website builder, and WordPress install.
- Offers you 50GB of storage space with unlimited bandwidth in the basic plan.
- You will get free email accounts, consistent support, and an SSL certificate.
- Provides you various plans with different costs for different business requirements.
- Suitable for new websites.
2. A2 Hosting
Hostgator is the best solution if you want to create simple websites. It was founded in 2002 with its headquarters in Texas. It is a world-leading provider for shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated forms of web hosting.
It started with 3 servers but now offers more than 12k servers. Hostgator backs over 1 million domains, making up 1 percent of the world’s internet. It serves all types of customers from individuals to top global companies across more than 200 countries.
Highlights
- One of the fastest shared web hostings with a 270ms average loading time.
- Has optimized servers for using WordPress, providing a LiteSpeed cache facility.
- Highly reliable with 99.97 percent of uptime.
- Can be easily integrated with popular CMSs, like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
- Offers a free SSL certificate, unlimited storage, and free site migration with all plans.
- Provides consistent tech support.
3. DreamHost
DreamHost is one of the oldest web hosting providers and has been in the market since 1996. Over its tenure, DreamHost has hosted over 1.5 million websites. It is a Los Angeles- based company offering web hosting and domain name registration services.
It was founded in 1996 by New Dreamworks Network, LLC. By 1997, it was used commercially for hosting sites. It comes with a 97-day money-back guarantee.
Highlights
- Highly considered due to its hassle-free monthly plans.
- Its basic plan offers a free domain, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth.
- Offers you an SSL certificate, domain management tools, and ensures unlimited data transfer.
- Has pre-installed WordPress.
- Comes with a beginner-friendly website builder.
- Provides consistent tech support.
4. SiteGround
SiteGround has been around since 2004 and has hosted over 2 million domains to date. Three university students introduced the web hosting platform in 2004 in Bulgaria (Silicon Valley of Europe). It is a fully-grown web hosting company now with more than 500 employees.
Highlights
- Ensures the best uptime of 99.99 percent.
- Offers great customer support.
- All of its plans come with a website builder, email account, SSL, and automatic backups.
- Ideal for WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting.
5. GoDaddy Hosting
GoDaddy is an American company offering web hosting and domain name registration services. It has its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. As of now, it has more than 20 million customers and over 7k employees.
Founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons in Baltimore, GoDaddy has hosted more than 44 million websites up until now, the most of any web hosting provider.
Highlights
- Well-suited for both small and large-scale enterprises.
- Ensures 99.95 percent of uptime.
- Provides developer-friendly tools like cPanel.
- Offers features like site backups, SSL certificates, and email accounts.
- Delivers fast 24X7 customer support.
7. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks was founded in 2007 by Trey Gar. It offers the leading green energy-based shared, reseller, VPS, dedicated server, and WordPress hosting services globally. As it consumes energy produced by wind, GreenGeeks is a carbon-reducing company.
It is based out of Agoura Hills, California. GreenGeeks serves thousands of customers, covering more than 150 countries. This server has been in the market for more than 12 years and has hosted hundreds of thousands of websites.
Highlights
- Ensures a great uptime of 99.95 percent.
- Delivers high-quality consistent customer support and user-friendly panels.
- Provides you one free domain for one year, free SSL, unlimited storage, daily backups, and data transfer.
- Allows you to move to a VPS hosting plan if your data grows.
- Works well for medium-sized as well as small companies.
8. InMotion
InMotion hosting serves domain names and web hosting services across Virginia and California. This hosting server has been around since 2001 and has hosted over more than 100k websites. It is serving over 300k customers globally.
Highlights
- Ensures a server uptime of 99.93 percent.
- Its basic plan comes with benefits like a free SSL certificate and more than 400 application integrations.
- Offers consistent live support with a great knowledge base.
- Whenever your data grows, you can move it to a VPS hosting plan easily.
9. IONOS Hosting
IONOS is a web hosting server founded in 1988 owned by United Internet, a Germany-based global internet services provider. It has two headquarters, one in Montabaur, Germany, and the other in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania.
The web hosting provider has more than 2k employees working it to success across 40 countries. IONOS is helping more than 8 million customers worldwide with ten data centers and 90k servers around the world. Unfortunately, it does not provide live chat support and will also cost you site migrations.
Highlights
- Offers VPS, cloud, dedicated, and WordPress hosting options.
- Ensures 99.98 percent of uptime.
- Its cheapest plan offers features like a website builder, free SSL certificate, one free domain, email, along with CMS support.
10. HostPapa
HostPapa has been in the market since 2006 and has hosted millions of websites over the years. A Canadian company privately owns it. HostPapa offers shared reseller, and VPS forms of hosting.
In 2012, it had partnerships with CloudFlare to optimize the company’s performance and with SiteLock website security. It was recognized as the fastest-growing company in Canada in 2015.
Highlights
- Ensures excellent performance and worth for the money.
- Offers an excellent uptime of 99.99 percent with 565ms of average page speed.
- Delivers consistent live chat support and email support in over 18 countries and 4 different languages.
- Its cheapest plan offers free site migration, free SSL certificate, CDN, and web builder.
- Provides you one free domain, 100 GB of data storage, and unlimited bandwidth.
Conclusion
You will get various hosting servers in the market for your business. Choosing the right web hosting provider is essential for any website’s success. We have mentioned 9 top hosting servers in this article that have benefited thousands of websites across the globe.
Please note that this is not an exclusive list as there are more web hosting options available other than the ones mentioned above. If these won’t work for your business type, you can look for others. However, the chances of the aforementioned happening are very less.
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