If you think where you host your website doesn’t affect your site’s speed, then you’re sorely mistaken. When it comes to hosting, the saying, “you get what you pay for” applies.
Signing up for the cheapest web hosting package you could find is not such a great idea. It’s like building your house on the sand and expecting it to withstand strong winds. If you want your site to succeed, then choose a reputable web host with reasonable prices. Your site will be in better hands.
There are generally 3 kinds of web hosting: shared, virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated.
Shared Hosting
If you’re just a beginner and you’re just setting up your first website, then shared hosting is the way to go. It’s the cheapest option. Your site will be hosted on a server that’s home to other websites as well, maybe hundreds or thousands of other sites.
Shared hosting is cheap because you’re basically renting space on a server and you’re dividing the server cost with other website owners. The downside is that when one of your server-mates or neighbors start getting popular (or gets hacked!), they’ll use up a lot of your shared server’s resources. All sites on that server get affected which often means reduced loading speeds.
VPS hosting
If your site is starting to gain some traction and you’re tired of getting slower website speeds thanks to the limitations of shared hosting, then you may be ready for a VPS.
While VPS is technically still ‘shared’ hosting, it’s a different kind of sharing. One physical server is divided into virtual servers. Each virtual server can only host a limited number of websites, and the resources are split evenly. This means that if you (or your neighbors) get a spike in traffic, then other sites are not going to get affected (which is what usually happens in regular shared hosting).
Dedicated hosting
If your sites get thousands of visitors daily, then shared hosting and VPS is not going to work for you. When you’ve got traffic numbers like this, then you need dedicated hosting.
It’s the most expensive kind of hosting because you are renting an entire server. You’re not sharing it with anybody so you can customize it however you want, and you don’t need to worry about anyone stealing your resources.
