In the previous lesson, we defined the different types of web hosting services available today. But how do we decide which approach best fits our website?

Furthermore, even if we’ve decided the type of hosting we need, we have to find a reliable service among hundreds that swarm the web hosting industry?

With that in mind, here are some of the major factors we need to keep in mind when choosing a web hosting service.

The Nature of Our Website

In order to decide a web hosting plan, we need to understand the behavior and the size of our website. Let’s discuss this for all the hosting options we have.

Conventional Hosts

For a small website that does not currently generate a lot of traffic or revenue, a shared hosting service would prove beneficial. It would be cheap and we wouldn’t need to worry about server failures in case of excessive traffic. The only downside is that the server may restrict you from running all the softwares you want.

A large business should always opt for dedicated hosting as it is the most efficient. It will also provide us with the highest storage space. Managed hosting would be better because it will ensure better security than any other web hosting plan.

A virtual private server falls in the middle of the spectrum between shared and dedicated hosting. The higher degree of freedom and the moderate cost makes it ideal for medium sized and rapidly growing websites.

Cloud Hosting

Moving to the cloud can be very beneficial for larger or growing businesses. It is much easier to scale our resources on the cloud. Educative itself uses the Google Cloud Platform. We highly recommend opting for a cloud host if one can afford it.

Reliability and Uptime Rates

A good web host is one which is always running, making your site available to anyone at any time. We should steer clear of a server that shuts down frequently and has an unsatisfactory uptime rate. The more popular services like Bluehost or InMotion have uptime rates higher than 99.9%, which makes them extremely reliable.

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