In the contemporary digital world, businesses have emerged at their fullest due to their massive online presence. Today, owning a business is not all that you need to reap hefty revenues, and having a website has become mandatory.
“A website’s success relies entirely on the reliability and worthiness of its hosting provider”
Having a website doesn’t require you to sign up for its domain name only but a hosting subscription too. Nevertheless, hosting plays a vital role in managing traffic, data, and information on your site. Thus, you need to rely on a reliable and worthy provider that offers plans, services, and features befitting your requirements. For this, we have evaluated the top web hosting providers, developed fresh websites, and tested them to come up with the top performing and best web hosting services.
Be it a launch or migration of a site from one hosting service to another, we have highlighted detailed information about the best web hosting providers that you need to know. Read along to discover everything:
Advertisement
Domain Name and Web Hosting – Why You Need Them?
Netizens are often confused with domain names and web hosting. Not only this, they often consider both as the same. However, there’s a fine line between both:
There are more than 157 million registered .com domain names around the world.
Domain Naming
After an individual domain registration, a domain name provides a person with authority and ownership rights of a website. In other words, none can create and register a site with exactly same domain name that you have already registered. However, you will require a web host to put any content on your site.
The .com domains make up about 50% of overall registered domain names worldwide.
Advertisement
Web Hosting
In essence, web hosting involves all the hardware including servers that store content, videos, images, text, and all files that you need on your website. These files are the same that you use on your computers such as jpeg, mp3, png, and many more.
On another hand, website files could vary from .php, .HTML, or other formats. In fact, a web hosting provider tends to rent out access to its servers, providing services such as server maintenance and more for a monthly fee.
Now, when a visitor types in the domain name of your site on a web browser, the device communicates with a web hosting server. Afterward, the server sends all the site files to that browser, which then appears as your site. Putting it simply, a web hosting provider offers a place to store files that make up a site.
Free Vs. Paid Web Hosting
Undeniably, there are tons of free web hosting services available on the internet such as Wix, Weebly, Jimdo, and many more. However, free web hosting services might be suitable for individuals who require a simple website regardless of exclusive designing tools and bandwidth perks.
Against these two tradeoffs, a person could have a free website. However, a concerning aspect of the free web hosting providers is the placement of ads on your site that provide them with revenues.
Advertisement
Who can avail benefits from free web hosting service?
Free web hosting providers might not be of any good to enterprise-level businesses, but there are various individuals who can avail benefits from a free web hosting provider.
Having said that, small businesses and startups could utilize these free websites to gain prominence in cyberspace. Afterward, they could switch to one of the best web hosting services for a unique domain, credibility, and features such as unlimited storage, bandwidth, and tons of security aspects.
How much do domain registration costs?
Irrefutably, the top web hosting service could offer a free domain name registration for the first year. However, a registered domain name requires an annual fee payment that varies from $10 to $20. In addition, when signing up for a domain name registration, ensure that you are not seeing their promotional rate, as it could increase dramatically once a promotional period expires.
Besides, we have discovered that many web hosting services offer discounted and affordable plans initially. But, their monthly plan and domain registration fee after one year get sky-high. Thus, we have listed above only those providers who offer economical plans instead of cheap attention-seeking strategies.
Different Types of Web Hosting Providers
Web hosting is a quite complicated industry in terms of offerings, features, pricing plans, and more. Not only this, many companies charge fees as per the type of hosting that could be either shared, virtual private server, dedicated, or cloud hosting.
Having said that, we have explained each type of web hosting service below:
Shared Web Hosting
A shared web hosting provider places multiple websites on a single server. Interestingly, it is one of the least expensive web hosting service. Besides, each client shares a hosting space on a shared web hosting server.
Many shared web hosting providers offer the reliability of websites but only at the initial stage. The reason lies in the fact that when you exceed an assigned bandwidth regularly on a shared package, the web hosting service will demand you to upgrade to exclusive plans.
How to Choose The Best Shared Hosting
Just like any other hosting, there are a few things that need to be considered before picking your shared hosting. There are certain essential aspects that need to be addressed which are as follows:
\\ Related post
Technical Requirement
If you don’t have more than 800 daily page views, then a shared hosting plan is the ideal option for you. It meets your technical requirement at a more affordable rate. Some web hosting plans also offer ‘unlimited’ hosting, but it is more of a marketing gimmick where you will receive update and revival notifications upon completion of a certain volume.
Furthermore, you cannot store your personal files on your shared hosting as a part of the ‘unlimited’ space.
Domain Management Tools
It is crucial for you to look at which control panel you’re picking as the platform before you finalize your web hosting plan. Many hosts offer free domain plans for at least the first year, whereby you can transfer to paid hosting after the trial period. More companies, however, have developed plans with control panels where you can control your domain.
cPanel (Control Panel)
The ideal web hosting plan is the one that offers you complete control of the control panel. However, only a few hosting plans offer complete control while many don’t. Some of the providers also offer custom control panels which are efficient and very easy to use. With tutorials and guides, you can easily master the art of controlling it.
Multiple Website Hosting
Many web hosting sites offer multiple domains and websites within one shared hosting account. They offer multiple websites hosting option usually under the ‘unlimited domains and website’ options however, as mentioned earlier, it’s just a marketing gimmick and doesn’t necessarily mean unlimited volume.
VPS Hosting
Virtual private service (VPS) hosting is a next-level service when compared with shared web hosting. It encompasses a more powerful configuration on the CPU side.
This type of web hosting service is suggested for businesses that generate a large number of traffic. However, server space is shared, but you can customize the space when desired. In addition, premium security features are the added benefits of VPS hosting.
Hardware Performance
To determine the hardware performance CPU speed benchmarks are calculated to evaluate the VPS web hosting costs through which companies can evaluate the performances. Therefore, it is necessary for companies to establish the ability and the data transfer rates on every account to reassure the ability of various uplink providers.
Bandwidth limit
One should always make crystal clear the subscribed bandwidth is sufficient for your data transfer and other web hosting requirements. Almost all VPS providers will charge you for an extra bandwidth limit once you surpass your prescribed limit. Therefore, ensure that the prescribed bandwidth limit is sufficient for you.
Plans Scalability
There are a few methods of determining VPS hosting prices. One is through searching for high memory as it will be less costly than going for plans worth high scalability and bandwidths as compared to normal plans.
Furthermore, many plans that seem cheap actually may carry a lot of hidden costs and charges, therefore carefully scrutinize the plans. Also, dedicated plans may be costlier but they are the best options for long-term plans.
Security
It’s your foremost priority to ensure your data is secured and your customer’s information is protected at all costs. You need to take three elements into focus for this, your software, your hosting provider, and your team.
Cloud VPS and managed hosts need security upgrades on daily basis and the same goes for data backup as these allow website restoration during a system crash, therefore all data must be secured and backed up.
Advertisement
Dedicated Hosting
As the name indicates, dedicated hosting doesn’t involve renting a server space that shared and VPS hosting do. In dedicated hosting, a single server is assigned for a single site.
The main advantage of dedicated hosting is protection against accidental crashes that happen due to traffic spikes on shared sites. However, dedicated web hosting might not be suitable for small businesses, bloggers, or personal usage, as it demands an expert for regular maintenance and management of servers.
How to Choose the Best Dedicated Hosting
It is an undeniable fact that every business wants complete autonomy and control over its hosting need, preferring the most loyal hosting services as the number one choice in the market. And for this, the size of the business does not matter, whether big or small, every business wants if not a massive then at least a wide array of options for their web applications websites and web applications. Brands choose the servers that offer them the most feasibility in terms of mobility and accessibility to server options.
Before purchasing any server, users should consider the following aspects for identifying the ideal servers.
Bandwidth & Data Center Issues
Many data centers provide users with an option to choose the bandwidth provider based on a loyal and dedicated hosting account. Some companies also offer ports ranging from 1 Gbps- 40 Gbps along with various pricing options that are based on the bandwidth rates made on the account. However, the best practice remains that you make certain that the hosting company you choose has multiple redundant telecom connections to host different bandwidth speed options.
Managed vs. Non-managed Hosting Support
Being a user, one of the important decisions you have to make is to decide if you want to go for managed or unmanaged hosting. The only difference between the two is that managed hosting offers you feasibility by taking complete responsibility for offering you support for each task and problem, regardless of it being in your emergency or daily hosting features.
Hardware
It is essential to pay for incredible hardware with top-notch quality since you are renting out a whole physical server. Don’t go for a void of an outdated, sluggish, and lethargy component by compromising on the price. Dedicated servers with grade SSDs and HDDs are the ideal choice. You can also search for classic, Dell, HP, and Super Micro servers that are the safest bet and have made a decent name for themselves in the industry.
Network Quality and Up-time
The best web host is considered the one with the best network quality. To find that about a host, you need to find out the ‘Tier’ rating as it gives the best description of how good or bad the infrastructure of the network really is. The best hosters that come under ‘Tier 1’ are known to have almost nonredundant power with an up-time of 99.7671%.
Control Panels & Software
It is essential that you have a service provider that will provide you with both, a functional interface and a clean panel.
Server Extensions
Eliminating the need for highly complex systems, some web hosts offer ‘serverless’ solutions that facilitate things on a whole different level for you.
Their server extensions are basically the programming languages that are added to the collection of WAMP/LAMP pile of custom development and its respective requirements.
Advertisement
Final Thoughts
We hereby wrap our guide about the best web hosting services in 2022. Till now, we have revealed what web domain and hosting services are, the types of web hosting services and what should you look for in the best web hosting provider.
In addition, for your ease, we picked the industry’s top web hosting services and passed them through individual testing to come up with the top performing providers mentioned in this article.
