This article is for people who’d like to know the background about what a Web hosting provider is.
If you’d like to skip ahead to buying a hosting service and setting up your Web site, you can go here.
What is a Web host and a Web server?
Once you’ve chosen a domain name, the next step is to set up your Web server at a Web hosting provider.
I know those words might kind of strange to a lot of you. Let me explain.
A Web server is a computer. It’s pretty much the same as the computer that you’re reading this one, only it’s on and connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Unlike your computer, this computer generally has one function: to accept connections from your audience and “serve” them your Web site.
A Web host, also called a Web hosting provider, is in business to maintain Web servers for you and thousands of others.
Technically, you could set up a Web server on your own desktop or laptop computer and open it up for the world to access it. This is actually what most companies did not too many years ago. These days, the vast majority of people and companies use Web hosts to save the costs of buying and maintaining their own computers and infrastructure.
What are all the options for Web hosting?
There are three basic kinds of Web hosting providers out there. I am a sucker for analogies, so I like to compare Web hosting providers to buying a house.
Cloud Computing Services are like McMansions. They’re gigantic houses that are huge and built on acres of private property. They’re impressive, but they cost a lot to maintain.
Website Builders are like public housing. They’re (relatively) cheap and they provide the basic amenities and comforts of home, but they’re in super crowded neighborhoods and they all tend to look alike.
Managed Hosting Providers are like a nice single-family residential home or condo. You live in a neighborhood along with other houses and share some resources with them like roads, plumbing and electricity, but ultimately your home is yours to customize just the way you like it and invite people over.
1. Cloud Computing Services
What it is: A cloud computing service or “cloud provider” is essentially a company that owns and maintains a huge number of computers, infrastructure, and administrators, and “rents them out” to big companies who can use them as if they’re their own. The word “cloud” is really just a metaphor for “out there”, as in “I could try to maintain my own network and servers, or I could rent the ones out there.
Back in the day companies would routinely buy their own equipment and networking. As you can imagine, this was an enormous expense, especially given how quickly computers become outdated.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the three biggest cloud providers, controlling about 70% of the market. They each share similar histories; all had to build up their own massive Web infrastructure and architecture to serve their own customers and all had a main business that could help them fund and establish their cloud service.
Who uses it? Cloud services are mostly used by large corporations who can afford their own technical staff. Here are just a few examples. Netflix, Facebook, and X use AWS. Microsoft, Walmart, and Uber use Azure. PayPal, Etsy, and Spotify use Google Cloud.
What does it cost? Big businesses For a small business site you’re probably looking at a minimum of $500-$1000 a year just for the storage and data transfer costs, plus the cost of paying someone to manage the server for you.
What are the advantages? You really do get what you pay for. With cloud providers, companies enjoy stability, uptime, and performance, along with great customer service. If your small business ever turns into a medium or large business, you’re going to want to hire an IT person and go with a cloud service.
What are the drawbacks? The main drawback is complexity. With these cloud services you’re on your own as far as installing and maintaining your operating system, any applications such as WordPress, and all the configuration that goes with it. The cost is also astronomical, especially considering that you need to hire IT professionals to help you.
Is it a good choice for small businesses? Not at all. Cloud providers definitely give big business access to the most powerful computing power and the fastest networking connections in the world, but they come at a hefty price: the price a business pays them, plus the price that business pays to maintain its own IT staff. It’s really for businesses that have gotten so big and whose Web sites have gotten so popular that other kinds of hosts can’t handle the traffic anymore.
2. Website Builders
What is it: Wix and Squarespace are the biggest two companies in the space called “Website builders”. As a long-time Web professional, I think that’s being a bit generous. They’re essentially cookie-cutter sites. They’re easy to create, but the result is a generic site that looks like hundreds of others. It lets you check a box to say you have a Web site that resolves to your domain, but it’s not exactly a site you’ll show off to others.
Who uses it? Basically, small business owners who just want to get their Web site out of the way so they can focus on other things
What does it cost? Wix costs $432/year while Squarespace costs $276/year.
What are the advantages? It comes down the ease of use. Someone with zero computer skills can create Web pages that look “professional enough” and is one step above using a social media network as their business presence..
What are the drawbacks? The main problem is a lack of flexibility. The sites that are generated from Wix or Squarespace usually end up looking either cheap and amateurish and/or just like hundreds of other sites that use the same template.
Is it a good choice for small business? Generally I’d say no, at least not until these companies figure out how to generate Web sites that look a bit more professional and are a bit more customizable. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon, because they make the biggest profits when they can create only a handful of templates and get as many businesses to use them.
3. Managed or Shared Hosting Providers
What is it: A managed hosting provider is also a company that maintains computers, infrastructure, and administrators, but instead of one big company getting dedicated resources, the resources are shared across many smaller companies.
While that sounds like a recipe for disaster (and for some smaller Web hosting companies, it is), the larger and more established Web hosting companies do a pretty good job of making sure that one site can’t take down others or otherwise hog all the resources.
In addition to providing computers and infrastructure, managed hosting providers will set up your server’s operating system, provide help with setting up common applications like WordPress, and provide user friendly front-end interfaces to configure different aspects of your Web hosting. They’re also much more affordable.
There are two companies I personally recommend for managed Web hosting: GoDaddy and Hostinger. I’ll explain why I like them in my next post.
Who uses it? Most small business sites are hosting on a managed hosting provider or a page builder.
What does it cost? A shared hosting plan will cost around $100-$200 a year, and if you follow the guidance on this site, you shouldn’t need to hire an external consultant to build or manage it for you.
What are the advantages? The biggest advantage is that you have complete flexibility in how you want to build your site; by using things like WordPress Templates (which I’ll walk you through), you’ll be able to build a site that looks professionally designed and uniquely yours, unlike the sites that come out of the Website builder companies. It’s also much more affordable than cloud providers,
What are the drawbacks? The main issue people face, which is a nice problem to have, is when their site gets so much traffic that the hosting provider has to slow or shut down the site so that it won’t affect other businesses sharing those resources. That’s not the bad part—the bad part is when the hosting company does it without warning you in advance. When you see complaints about these companies on sites like Reddit, it’s almost always from people who face these rare situations and then struggle to find a customer service person who is qualified to handle it.
Another annoying thing about a lot of these companies is how they constantly try to get you to buy things you don’t need, and to save costs many of these companies are outsourcing to other countries.
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Is it a good choice for small businesses? When you balance cost, flexibility, and quality I think shared Web hosting is still the way to go for the vast majority of small businesses. The hardest part about it is building your Web site, but in the instructions on this site I’ll walk you through how to do that for a lot cheaper than you think with Web design and performance that rivals the best sites out there.
Conclusion
Within the managed hosting provider space there are a lot of choices, most of them pretty bad. In the next post I’ll walk you through who I’d recommend.
If you’d like to just get started with the Web host I recommend (GoDaddy), you can go here.
