Hosting Reviews – Why Use Host Wisely?

Finding a reliable web host can be one of the most challenging processes. You not only have to carefully select hosts based off things like their refund policies and uptime guarantees, but also their customer friendliness and the extra services they provide.

That makes this process both risky to your funds and your time, which are two things that you can't waste if you're one of the countless people who rely upon their website to facilitate business or to establish an income.

Host Wisely offers you an alternative place to learn about every quality of a potential web host. You'll learn about uptime guarantees, money-back refund policies, how well a given web host handles customer support, the reliability of hosts, what features that host provides, and everything else you would need to know before committing to any particular host.

Let's take a quick look at what web hosting is to better understand why reading web hosting reviews is imperative before you try one.

Web Hosting – What Is It, and Why Do You Need It?

The Internet is an overwhelmingly large network of computers, smart phones and other devices connected to one another. Websites allow for them devices to have a centralized hub for delivering information, interacting with one another, purchasing products and countless other actions.

Web hosting allows you to rent the hardware and software required to run a web host. It gives your round-the-clock access to the information you wish to publish, which means that it can be key in facilitating business or simply developing a presence for an idea or a brand.

What you may be surprised to learn is that you could set up your own web host, but chances are that it would be woefully inadequate compared to even the cheapest professional solution. You would need to build a redundant system, rent a very costly space on a data server and ensure that your host stayed accessible as often as possible.

Web hosts not only take care of these things for you, but they also allow you to do so in a cost-efficient way by taking advantage of the economics of scale. Renting from a web host tends to be considerably cheaper and easier to maintain due to this.

Now that you understand what web hosting is and why you need it, let's explore the different types of hosting that most hosts provide.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting uses one server for many different websites. While the administration of these websites tends to be separated and there is a layer of protection to keep data protected, the resources are shared by each website as it needs it.

That means that this type of hosting tends to have the lowest entry fee. You can acquire shared hosting for anywhere from $3 to $10 a month.

Another quality of shared hosting is the need for service to regularly be reviewed by a support team. This ensures that one customer isn't using all the resources and that everything continues to operate smoothly.

If one customer does use too many resources, it can negatively affect the performance of other websites on the same machine. This can lead to unexpected downtime, scripts failing to load and numerous other difficulties. This is one of the big reasons why finding a reliable host is important.

Shared hosting should be sufficient enough for most individuals and small businesses with a low to moderate amount of traffic.

VPS Hosting

Virtual private machines act much like an intermediate between shared and dedicated hosting. They are arranged much like shared hosts, but they have significantly more resources and each website is its own instance.

While one website can still negatively affect other websites on the same machine, VPS hosting tends to be more stable due to the fact that each website has a set amount of resources that it can use.

The other major advantage of a VPS hosting plan is the fact that you gain many of the higher level technical commands. Some VPS hosts allow you to use SSH to login to your web host, which can make administration significantly easier, or to modify your web server's running environment, which is necessary for some plugins and scripts.

VPS hosting tends to be adequate for medium businesses with moderate to high amounts of traffic and companies interested in light web app development.

Dedicated Hosting

The last major type of hosting is dedicated hosting. As the name implies, it's the kind of hosting that dedicates all the resources of any given server to just one website. You may even find dedicated hosting that dedicates the power of several machines.

Most hosts grant you full access to the server when you employ dedicated hosting. This allows you to customize it, to tweak it, and to optimize it for your website's specific needs.

The downside of this incredible amount of customization is that most hosts do not include support with dedicated hosting unless you purchase managed hosting. This means that you often have to pay an additional fee on top of the fees associated with this robust level of hosting.

Dedicated hosting is designed for large websites and businesses interested in heavy application development.

Hosting for Frameworks

The last major thing to understand about hosting is how frameworks like Drupal, Magento and WordPress fit in to the picture.

These frameworks are designed to make your life easier by giving your website enhanced functionality or by making it easier to administrate your website.

While they tend to be optimized for efficiency, some frameworks require more computing power than others due to the fact that they require accessing fresh copies of dynamic data while supporting a larger amount of users simultaneously. eCommerce solutions like Magento are an example of this.

Dedicated and VPS hosting align themselves well with the needs of eCommerce frameworks.

Frameworks designed for running static websites or blogs tend to require significantly less power. Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are examples of frameworks that can be further optimized to use caching, which in turn lowers how much processing power is required to run them.

Shared hosting tends to be sufficient for smaller websites running these frameworks. VPS hosting will provide the most cost-efficient solution for websites with more traffic and websites that require a more reliable service.