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What is hosting? What are the types of hosting and what makes a good-quality hosting? How does the importance of hosting affect business outcomes, user experience, and SEO scores? With over 7 years of experience working with the WordPress platform and based on practical experiences using various hosting services, Bii will share personal experiences about hosting in this article.
Hosting is simply understood as the storage space for a website’s data on the internet. Hosting will store all of the website’s files, including images, text, video files, and code files. Hosting can be seen as a computer with specifications such as CPU, RAM, and SSD storage capacity.
Hosting services are provided by companies that offer basic to advanced hosting packages for customers. Essentially, you are renting hosting services from these providers as a place to store your website data, and the hosting provider is responsible for maintaining continuous and stable operating conditions for the website system 24/7/365.
Currently, hosting is divided into four different types: Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Server (also known as VPS), Dedicated Hosting (private storage server), and Cloud Hosting (essentially the same as Shared Hosting but with distributed data storage on the cloud, this is a higher-end form of Shared Hosting). Each type of hosting has its own characteristics, configuration specifications, and management methods according to the needs of users.
In summary, hosting is the storage space for a website system on the internet that helps keep your website running continuously. Hosting services refer to companies or organizations that invest in infrastructure equipment to operate a business by renting out hosting services.
See more: How did Bii build this website?
The hosting service includes many features and integrated utilities
As mentioned above, there are currently four main types of hosting: Shared Hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Server), Dedicated Hosting, and Cloud Hosting. Let’s explore detailed information about each type of hosting with Bii right below.
Shared hosting is essentially a resource that is divided into smaller parts on a main server, so you will have to share resources like CPU, RAM, etc. with other Shared hosting packages. Because of this, Shared hosting is usually the cheapest type of hosting among the four types and also the least stable. This is currently the most popular hosting type and the largest in all types of hosting, which is suitable for basic websites like blogs, information pages, and new websites with not much data.
In addition, Shared hosting is often limited by traffic. When your website reaches a certain limit (50,000, 70,000…visitors/month depending on the service provider), it will encounter problems such as crashes, and network congestion, and at this point, you need to upgrade to a higher hosting service like VPS or dedicated servers.
One issue with Shared hosting is its relatively low security. Because it uses the same resources on the same server, when one website is attacked or infected by a virus, it will affect other websites on the server, causing negative impacts for all websites.
However, due to its affordability and integration with many user-friendly features such as cPanel interface, one-click WordPress installation, automatic data backup, etc., Shared hosting is still the number one choice for beginners or small websites that want to save costs.
See more: Top 5 best hosting for WordPress websites
The pros of Shared hosting are its affordability and a wide range of features suitable for beginners
This is a higher-end form than Shared Hosting, VPS is an independent virtual server created from 1 physical server, the difference is that each VPS is assigned a separate resource such as CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and SSD… which helps your website to achieve better performance than using Shared Hosting (many websites share the same resources).
Because of its independent resources, VPS has better security than Shared Hosting, with a significantly reduced risk of being attacked, hacked, or DDoS. And of course, the cost of VPS is higher than Shared Hosting, VPS is suitable for websites with relatively high traffic (from 100,000 traffic/month and above) and websites with high requirements for speed and performance.
From Bii’s personal point of view, if you are just starting to build a website or your website does not have much traffic, you should consider using Shared Hosting to save costs, and importantly, Shared Hosting comes with many additional utilities. With VPS, you will need more advanced management and configuration knowledge than with Shared Hosting, not suitable for beginners.
See more: 5 reasons why you should choose WordPress to build a website
VPS is a type of hosting that sits between Shared hosting and Dedicated hosting
This is the highest form of storage currently applied to large corporate conglomerates (Amazon, Facebook, Google…). With a huge amount of traffic coming from all over the world, using shared hosting and VPS will not be able to handle it, so using physical servers is necessary.
This is a premium hosting type as you will own an independent server, with full access and control over 100% of the server’s configuration, including CPU, unlimited bandwidth, RAM, etc. In addition, the cost of Dedicated Hosting is much more expensive than Shared hosting and VPS.
For basic website building and low traffic per month, using physical servers is very expensive and not suitable for most websites in the world. When your website reaches millions of traffic per month, consider using Dedicated Hosting. In most cases, Shared hosting and VPS are sufficient for the needs of most current websites on the internet.
Cloud hosting is a more advanced form of Shared hosting, where your data is distributed to cloud storage by a cluster of virtual servers, which helps minimize risks compared to other forms of storage because, in Shared hosting, data will be concentrated in one place, which may affect the website in case of server failure causing downtime and lag…
Overall, Cloud hosting is a breakthrough in data storage compared to the above 3 types because of its flexibility in distributing risks to multiple virtual servers. In addition, by distributing resources flexibly, you can register to use according to your needs and expand your website over time without being constrained as in Dedicated Hosting.
Currently, Cloud Hosting is becoming increasingly popular, gradually replacing traditional Shared hosting. The only drawback of Cloud Hosting compared to Shared hosting is that the operating cost is higher and it is more difficult to access for users who do not want to spend a lot of money on hosting services.
See more: Easily boost website speed to 100/100 with the Accelerator plugin
The web host is a combination of various integrated technologies within a service package
To evaluate the quality of a good or bad hosting service, there are many different factors to consider. However, Bii will summarize the shortest based on 4 main criteria to evaluate whether the hosting quality is good enough and worth buying. The 4 main criteria to evaluate the quality of hosting are:
That’s 4 main ways to help you identify whether the hosting service is reliable so that we can trust and use their hosting services or not. Go into detail on each criterion so that you can understand more clearly.
This is the most important criterion when you decide to use hosting services because the speed performance of hosting directly affects the customer experience on your website, thereby affecting your pocketbook revenue.
Furthermore, another important point is that performance also affects the SEO ranking of search engines like Google, and Bing. As of 2023, search engines prioritize page loading speed even more. Therefore, high-speed hosting is an extremely important criterion to help you increase your ranking on search engines.
A high-speed hosting service includes the following conditions:
Due to the reasons mentioned above, Bii would not use InterServer hosting services if they want to build a website for the Singapore market, even though InterServer is a very high-quality and affordable hosting provider in the United States. The main reason is that they do not have a Data Center located in Singapore, so instead, Bii will use HostArmada or Hostinger.
Low-quality hosting is the main cause of slow website performance
Here is another important factor that you need to consider before using hosting services. During the hosting operation, there are often incidents such as malfunctions, cable breaks, DDoS attacks, bandwidth congestion… These could cause your website to experience lagging, and longer loading times, and make it inaccessible to users. In more severe cases, downtime could result in loss of traffic and revenue.
During such times, the customer support department will work to solve the issue. Lower-quality hosting providers typically have longer response times, and you may have to wait over a day to get your ticket resolved (during that day, your website’s traffic could be affected, and if you’re running ads, you’ll still be spending money without any returns – that’s terrible).
Some hosting providers respond very quickly, but their technical team may not be sufficiently experienced, and may not be able to help you fix the issue completely, leading to recurring problems. There are certain standards for good customer service that a hosting service should meet, such as:
Meeting all the above criteria, you can rest assured that it is a hosting provider with excellent customer support services. However, it should be noted that only a few hosting providers support native languages like Hostinger, which helps customers to easily interact. While most hosting services only choose English as the supported language.
See more: user-friendly and SEO-friendly website
Customer support is a quality factor evaluated alongside performance and speed for web hosting
Good hosting will be equipped with many important features to increase performance and website security, as well as maintain website stability for a long period of time. When purchasing hosting, you should consider the additional features that the provider integrates into their service package. Some important and necessary features include:
Generally, if a hosting provider offers more additional features, it will help you easily build a website and save quite a bit of cost. Therefore, when using hosting services, you should consider the features that they integrate into their service package.
And finally, there is the pricing factor. This is a factor to consider when evaluating the quality of the product before using hosting services. A high-quality hosting service, in addition to strong performance and excellent service support, must come with a good price that is affordable for most people.
For example, Kinsta is a premium hosting provider with excellent speed that is almost at the top of the current hosting market. However, the cost is too expensive for most users’ financial capabilities. Therefore, Bii evaluates Kinsta as a provider of very good quality hosting but with an unfavorable price.
HostArmada offers high-quality hosting services at an affordable price
Based on the information above, Bii would like to introduce to you some reliable hosting service providers that are trusted by the WordPress community, including the one that Bii uses.
Above are 5 quality international hosting providers verified by the WordPress community. As for the domestic hosting market in Vietnam, there are currently 3 most prominent units:
Depending on the need and current situation of the website, if your website is just starting to build or has little traffic, you should start with Shared Hosting packages to save costs
Shared Hosting and VPS are both forms of renting storage space for websites. VPS is an upgraded form of Shared Hosting where you get to use dedicated resources, unlike Shared Hosting. VPS has better pricing, security, and speed compared to Shared Hosting.
You should consider the possibility of upgrading from Shared Hosting to VPS or Dedicated Hosting when the number of traffic increases significantly (at least > 100,000 traffic/month). If you do not upgrade in case the traffic exceeds the loading capacity of Shared Hosting, it will cause the website to slow down and experience downtime.
So through the article on Bii, we hope to have provided sufficient information about hosting and how to help you find the most suitable hosting service to build your own website!
Bii Nguyen
Hello everyone, I’m Bii Nguyen – the founder of this website. The website was created with the desire to spread useful knowledge to everyone.
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With over 7 years of experience in the field of Digital Marketing, Biiviet.com is a blog that shares knowledge on building a personal brand and making money through websites and social media. All the knowledge provided is free and based on real-life experiences.
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