7 June 2022
What is Web Hosting? & Why your website needs it
Creating a website for the first time can seem overwhelming, it can be hard to know what’s a necessary cost and what’s not. Well, we are here to break it down for you and reassure you that web hosting is a necessary cost you do not want to skimp on.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is essentially the home of your website. To make your website visible on the internet, your website's files and data must be physically stored on a computer that is connected to the internet, these high powered, always on, computers are called web servers. Once your website's files are uploaded to a web server, the hosting company that owns or commissions those servers is then responsible for delivering these files to internet users. Simply put, If you have a website you will need somewhere to host it.
There are a multitude of web hosting providers to choose from that offer a variety of different web hosting services and packages. These services can range from budget plans such as ‘Shared’ web hosting services, where your website is hosted on the same server as hundreds of other websites. To dedicated “cloud” hosting services that are more specialised and scalable for specific business needs such as high performance ecommerce websites. Your choice of service will often depend on how much traffic your website expects, how much computing power is needed to serve your web pages to large audiences, and if you expect spikes of massive traffic like concert tickets going on sale.
Hosting with NetPotential
With the multitude of hosting providers online offering services at differing price points, why host with us? The reasons for this can be broken up into the following three main points.
We use high performance ‘cloud’ servers provided by Amazon AWS or Windows Azure
Some benefits of this include...
- Having access to data centres built on billion dollar infrastructure.
- There is no need for us to buy hardware which is expensive and time consuming to provision. Thus keeping your hosting costs to a minimum.
- We have the ability to “spin up” new servers in minutes as needed.
- We have the option of starting small and scaling up as your website traffic grows.
We manage our own servers
This means that we have direct access to crucial server configurations and functionalities. Thus, we have the ability to uptake necessary maintenance and security updates frequently and instantly. Additionally, this direct access to our servers makes it easier and quicker to fix any server related issues that may cause issues for your website.
Instant Support
Hosting your website with us, rather than a low budget shared server with an international hosting provider, will give you a sure and direct point of contact. Rather than waiting on hold for hours, or days for an email response, you can be assured that your hosting provider is just one quick phone call away with instant access to rectify any issues.