Web Hosting is completely a technical thing that can only be handled by very experienced people. Hosting computer is the physical place where your website resides. It include servers that deliver your files to your site visitors. Choosing a hosting company for your website is the first step for setting your site. Hosting company determines the availability, efficiency, and speed of your site. Therefore, before deciding on the exact hosting company to use, you need to research on different hosting companies extensively. Here is everything you must know to enable you make a good decision on the best WordPress Hosting for your WordPress blog or website
Everything you Must Know about WordPress Hosting Before You Buy
1. Hosting type:
There are different characteristics that are used to describe different types of hosting services. A hosting server can be classified as shared, virtually private, or dedicated. In shared hosting, different sites share one single server, with each customer getting a little slice of the server, but within certain limits. Most common form of hosting takes this type of hosting and it is perfectly fine for most website. virtual private server uses software to run several sites on the server as if they were dedicated servers. Websites that employ virtual private server shares the server technically but the software is put in place to offer the feel of a dedicated server. It is more secure, fast, and cost more than shared hosting service.
The third type of server is the dedicated hosting service. Dedicated server runs only a single site on a server. It is the fastest, secured, and most expensive type. Another type is cloud hosting, which is new in the market. Cloud hosting services provide hosting for websites on virtual servers which pull their computing resource from extensive underlying networks of physical web servers, it describes a method of configuring servers in a flexible way to allow for the most affordable, scalable, and reliable web infrastructure. Cloud servers scale with incredible speed. You can expand or reduce servers in seconds to ensure that the server keeps up with demand without wasting money on unnecessary resources.
2. Storage space:
Hosting companies provide hard drive space on their server for storing your files such as images, HTML files, PHP files and many others. Amount of space you need depends on the amount of files included on your website. Most simple websites require about 5 MB while complex websites used by many people use about 150 MB. Multimedia files such as photos and videos require more spaces. To minimise that, you need to resize your photos and compress your videos before uploading. Space should be considered as most companies offer larger space than what you can utilise while others offer unlimited spaces.
3. Bandwidth:
This is the amount of data that can be transferred within a unit time. most companies are now offering large bandwidth so you shouldn't really be worried about this unless you are transferring large chunk of pictures, videos and photos. Most websites, generally, require less than 20 GB per month. Therefore, a web host providing a bandwidth of 20 GB is good for a simple website without a lot of files. You should also try to find out what will happen in case of traffic surges. Will they take your site down or would they bill you. Traffic surges can result from oddest combination of current events and search engine results and can lead to a surprisingly high cost.
4. Maximum PHP Runtime:
Most services provide a limit a PHP script can run on their servers. Most hosting companies do not want scripts that run for hours as they reduce the performance of the server. If a script reaches the set run time limit, the server will kill it. This is bad if the script was performing as required. For this reason, some companies increase expected run time for some specific scripts that are expected to run for a longer time. Thirty seconds is good for most scripts.
5. PHP memory:
Hosting service also set the amount of main memory allowed for a script to use at once. The amount of memory required by your scripts depends on your PHP script. Large PHP scripts handling large amount of data require larger memory. The amount of PHP memory allowed by different hosting companies vary from as low as 16 MB to as larger as 1024 MB. However, a hosting company providing about 256 MB of PHP memory is good.
