The Basics of Web Hosting (And How To Find the Right Host for You)
I've now spent over 10 years working in web hosting. Before that, I was just a nerd who had her own domain and hosting package since 2000, so I knew bits and pieces, but now...now I know too much.
And it can be a real pain to try to figure out what you need for your website, especially if you're not that technical. I am no longer that technical. I'm still using server-side includes, for crying out loud. Anything more complicated than something you could use in 2005 is beyond me, and even that is stretching it.
But I am good at making ridiculous analogies to help people understand things. So here's my favourite.
What hosting is
You know how you live in a place? All the files and nonsense you have also need to live in a place in order for people to see it online.
That's hosting.
But what are all these options?
Yeah, a lot like how you have a lot of options for how you can live, there are a lot of options for how you can host your site.
Website Builders — Hotels
If you don't know how to code, these seem like a great idea. You pick a template, and start uploading pictures and start writing. Maybe you want to sell some stuff. Maybe you're just promoting your café. Whatever, you don't know how any of this works, you're just annoyed that you're having to use social media to promote your business when there's the opportunity to have your own domain name and website.
And if that's all you want, that's cool. It does what it needs to do. They're like hotels. Some of them are super-fancy and have loads of features and beautiful design, some of them are cheap and...don't. But they all share the basic problem.
You're paying a lot for very little customisation. You can't replace the furniture. You can't add your own art. And you definitely can't move to a different hotel and expect it to be exactly like the one you were just in. Sure, it's great to stay in, but after aw hile, the sterility, the sameness, the lack of "home" can get to you.
Shared Hosting — Apartments
So let's say you want to find a place you can customise a bit. You know, bring in that chair you really like, hang up pictures on the walls, really make it your own. Heck, maybe you want a separate bedroom, kitchen, and dining room without having to pay luxury suite prices. That's when you get shared hosting.
Shared website hosting used to be the default for a lot of websites. And it's still a major part of web hosting. You're getting a chunk of space on a web server, and, usually, the more you pay, the more space you get. It's not "unlimited", no matter what the spiel says, but if you're not taking advantage, you can usually just roll along, even if you're suddenly ridiculously popular.
The company takes care of a lot of the things you need to keep everything going. They make sure the electricity works, the plumbing isn't clogged, the locks on the doors work, that sort of thing. Sink breaks? They come in and sort it. Sometimes they'll upgrade part of your apartment for you, just to give you a nicer living experience.
There are good landlords and bad landlords, but if you're stuck with a slumlord, you can wait until your rental period is over and move right away. Just pack up all your stuff, and away you go.
And you do have neighbours. Some hosts will keep the number of apartments in a building low, some will cram as many people in as possible. Some neighbours will create trouble, having wild parties and creating a lot of noise, but most won't be causing any problems.
You can even get hosting that's specifically designed for certain products, like managed WordPress hosting. This would be like having a luxury apartment with a built-in kitchen, entertainment centre, concierge, thick walls, the works. It's built for exactly what you need, with added security, software updates, and a low number of accounts on each server, each account containerised to make sure all your resources are for you.
For a lot of websites, shared hosting is still a fantastic way to host your website. It can be affordable, convenient, and if you're just installing a simple CMS or even just putting up plain old HTML and CSS files, it's a good way to do it. With a lot of hosts, there's even more versatility. You can set up Git, you can install your favourite language, you can build applications, whatever. It's your apartment, you make it your home.
VPS — Terraced Housing
But if you want even more customisation, you can get a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This is like buying terraced (or row) housing. You have your own space, but you have neighbours on either side, with their own houses. Knock down walls, paint everything green, add in a patio, whatever you want to do, you can do it, it's your house. You can't knock a hole into the wall you share with your neighbour, but they are also a lot less likely to wreck your property as well.
The problem here is that, while it's great to have your own house, you are responsible for a lot more. You have to make sure everything works, from the locks to the plumbing to the bricks holding up that load-bearing wall. And if you don't know how to do it yourself, you'll have to hire someone, and that can be pricy.
But if you have a bit of knowledge, the freedom can be fantastic. Build whatever you want, have a webserver and a gameserver on the same account, go wild. And even if you don't have any knowledge, but want to learn, a cheap VPS that doesn't hold anything particularly important is a great way to learn all about web hosting, programming, and computing in general. If you wreck it, wipe it and start again.
Dedicated Servers — Detached Housing
If you're going to be hosting sensitive data on your systems, or want to make sure that absolutely everything that happens on your site only happens on your servers, a dedicated server is the way to go. And it's like having a house, separate from everyone, your own personal domain.
You pay for space in a data centre, much like how you pay property taxes on a house. You get hookups for water, electricity, and roads to drive to your house, but you're responsible for making sure the connections work in your house, from the water pipes to the driveway. And for this, you get the joy of owning your own server. You can do what you want with it. You don't have to worry about anyone else using all the CPU, anyone else throttling your bandwidth, nothing like that. It's your server. Install software, run applications, keep giant databases. As long as you're paying for it, you can use it.
This is definitely not for the faint-hearted, though. You have to put in the work for it, and it's really only ideal for companies that can't have their data on the cloud. But it beats trying to run a server in your house.
Self-Hosting — The Cabin In The Woods
This can be anything. This can be a palace, this can be a shack. This can be a private data centre in your basement or a disposable vape pen. You set everything up, you connect it to the Internet, it's all on you.
I used to know someone who self-hosted her website back in the early 2000s. On dial-up. Unsurprisingly, trying to view a website on dialup while the site itself is on dialup was unbelievably slow. But she owned the server, and she could decide when she wanted people to access it, and when she didn't.
And much like that cabin in the woods, self-hosting can lead to some amazing experiments, especially when it comes to sustainability and alternate energy sources. Just look at Low-Tech Magazine, running off of a tiny server and some solar panels!
Cloud Hosting — The Co-working Space
My analogy falls apart a bit when it comes to cloud hosting. It's like a VPS, except you're across several different servers, you're paying for what you're using when you're using it, not a flat rate for a set amount of space, processing, and time.
The closest I can get to it is a co-working space across several cities. You pay for when you're using it, you pay for what you're using, you can use it anywhere one exists. You need to know the rules and what you're going to do there, but you can pretty much do what you want. Use the features available in the space, like meeting rooms or recording studios, or just sit there with your laptop and work.
However, at least with a co-working space, you don't run the risk of accidentally spending thousands of pounds by forgetting about one bit of code. I suppose you could run up a kombucha bill or something similar, but...yeah. The analogy falls down.
How do I find the right host for me?
Now that you know what's out there, you then need to think about what you want from your host. There are a lot of hosts. Even with most of the smaller hosts being snapped up by larger companies, there are still a lot of names, a lot of offers, a lot of awards, and it can be really hard to find the right one.
I've slowly built up a general guide to choosing the right web host, and I work to keep it very non-denominational. Yeah, I work in web hosting. But where I work shouldn't influence people's decisions, unless I'm, like, representing the company at an event. And besides, my web hosting needs aren't your web hosting needs aren't what the company provides aren't what other people are looking for. So you have to do your research.
Think about what you need before you start looking
You don't need to know absolutely everything. You're going to have to guess on a lot of things. But if you know what you're thinking of doing, what your skill level is, and what you hope to get out of it, you can avoid being talked into something either way too small for what you're doing or way too complicated for your skill level. Then it's just a matter of doing your research.
Look at their pricing
So many companies have ridiculously low prices splashed across their website. All of that "Your site for 1p" nonsense. It looks like a good deal. But it's not.
It's all introductory pricing. It's 1p for the first month, but you're buying a three-year package where every month will be £20. It's £5 for the domain name, but email and privacy and SSL will bump the price up to £100 every year. There's no introductory pricing, but that £2 hosting charges you £10 for every gigabit you go over your bandwidth limit.
Carefully read all the details about the price, and make sure you're budgeting accordingly for what's going to happen.
Look at their terms
What are you planning on putting on there? Are you sure that you can actually host it on there? The acceptable use policy is incredibly important, because, most of the time, web hosts don't want to get into whatever petty squabbles you're in. They get a complaint, you're gone.
This isn't that much of a problem with most sites, but checking the policies will help you make absolutely certain you want to put your site there.
As an example, when I was first looking for web hosting, there were people I knew who were having their sites being taken down because they were hosting fanfiction. Your hosting company got a cease-and-desist from the gigantic conglomerate that owned that intellectual property, you were going down. Heck, sometimes they didn't even wait for a letter, they just looked at the files on their servers, went "well that seems sketch", and took your site down.
So I made sure to double-check that I could host fanfiction on my web host. Because I didn't want to have to hunt down a new web host just so my Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction archive could stay up and running through the decades.
Look at their reviews
It's not so much how many 5-star reviews they have or how gushing their fans are, it's what the 1-star reviews are and how they respond to them.
Are they all on, like, one single bad night several years ago? Is it a steady trickle of bad reviews over the entire time they've been up? Are they polite when they respond? Or are they petty?
If you had an issue with them, how would you want them to treat you?
Look at their content
This is more of a general vibe than any one particular thing — you want to get an idea of what they're like. What are they posting on socials? How are they responding to people? How often do they update their blog? What about their help pages? Do you feel like someone's looking after things or that they're just too swamped with something else to actually deal with this?
Are you happy?
If you look at everything, and you're excited about them, then, heck yeah, that's great for you. Become a fan, sing their praises, do what you want. But always keep an eye on what's happening with the company, because sales happen, staff move on, and things can change over time. Just look at what happened with Media Temple.
If you're not excited about them, but they're doing everything you need to do, then sign up and enjoy making stuff. You don't have to stick with them forever.
But at least you will have done your homework, and you won't, hopefully, get hit with any surprises.
Accidents can always happen
Don't forget, though. Any web host can disappear at any time. I remember when someone went on a tour of Livejournal's data centre and couldn't stop themselves from hitting the big "DO NOT TOUCH" button. I remember when the company I was working for had a hired electrician use the wrong power supply at the data centre.
Heck, maybe everything will get wiped in a gigantic EMP and we'll end up living the plot of Dark Angel. (If so, I claim dibs on running the bike messenger company.)
So don't expect your host to always be there for you. Keep backups. Have a few other hosts in your back pocket as an option. But like I said, you've done your homework. You'll be fine.