Half the headache of having a functional website downtime the process of web hosting. The importance of having a well-functioning website in this day and age cannot be stressed any further. You need the digital world to know you exist? A good website is much more than trendy designs and catchy content and web hosting is an integral part of it. Poor hosting services will lead to poor functionality of your site. If the user experience is not a favorable one, traffic to your site will reduce and so will your site’s search engine rankings.
There exist companies that offer hosting services. The charge depends on the quality of service provided among other factors. So, is it always a wise idea to go for the cheapest hosting plans in India? To answer this question, first, understand what you are being charged on.
Defining Web Hosting
Paying for the cheapest hosting plans in India is essentially paying for storage space. Your website is a conglomerate of files and folders that contain information. For internet users to access this information you need to have stored it properly and in a manner that is easily accessible.
The storage space you are paying for is the server space. Since you are ideally paying ‘rent’ for space, the issue of ensuring everything works as it should is no longer yours. This becomes the burden of the hosting company. It is the hosting company’s duty to ensure that the server functions as it should at all times to keep your website from experiencing any downtime. It is also the company’s responsibility to see to it that your files are safe in their storage.
Mechanisms of Web Hosting
As earlier mentioned, hosting services are much like renting out storage space. The only difference is that the storage facility is actually meant to ensure that the rest of the world has access to your files. The amount of storage space you have is dependent on your hosting plan of choice. There exist two main categories of hosting plans — shared and unshared.
Under the shared category you have the shared servers and the virtual private servers (VPS). The difference between the former and the latter is the allocation of resources and the level of control you possess over your storage space. For shared servers, you are at the mercy of other websites. Should one be taking up more resources at any given time, then the speed and functionality of your website bounds to suffer. Should one site’s security be compromised then the security of your files is also at risk. Given this constraint on the resource availability and this type of hosting plan, it best serves the needs of startup sites. These typically have low traffic and thus require fewer resources for them to obtain maximum effectiveness.
VPS and Cloud Hosting
VPS is slightly different. While the resources are shared, you have a virtual space whose resources are dedicated to your site. You also have some wiggle room when it comes to changing up certain features as well as improving the security of your site. The beauty of this type of shared hosting is that you can draw resources from servers. This type of hosting plan best suits those with the need for dedicated resources but cannot exactly afford them.
Another such hosting plan is cloud hosting. Like VPS, it enables you to draw resources from multiple servers and dedicate them to your site. The beauty about this plan is that the different servers in a way act as a backup plan for each other. Should one fail, the next will pick up the slack. Another upside of this hosting plan is its scalability and flexibility. It is also budget-friendly as it allows you to pay for only the necessary resources given the current stage of your website.
Dedicated hosting is an unshared plan. Here, all the resources of a given server are used to ensure the functionality of only your website. This, as you can imagine, comes with an added cost making it the most expensive of all the plans. Since you are not sharing resources, you have improved performance as well as security. You can choose to undertake the management of the server by yourself or opt to transfer that headache to a third party and pay for a managed plan.
Before you even get to the hosting, you need to get a domain name for your site. This is the unique tag that will be used to differentiate your site from others on the internet. Only after you get the domain name will you find the right server to host your site’s content.
Datacenters Vs Web Hosting
While these two terms are related, they have different purposes. Datacenters are the technical side of web hosting. The term is used collectively to define the infrastructure that enables hosting to happen. Web hosting is more of the service aspect. Taking time to understand the different types of hosting plans in relation to your website needs will help you determine if the cheapest hosting plans are the best way to go.
While these two terms are related, they have different purposes. Datacenters are the technical side of web hosting. The term is used collectively to define the infrastructure that enables hosting to happen. Web hosting is more of the service aspect. Taking time to understand the different types of hosting plans in relation to your website needs will help you determine if the cheapest hosting plans are the best way to go.