Web hosting
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the service that keeps a site’s files and database on a server connected to the internet, so the site answers when someone opens its address. It is paid periodically and usually includes disk space, traffic, mailboxes, backups and a certificate, though what a plan covers is written in the plan. The types — shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud — differ in who else uses the same resource and who administers the machine.
Example
A company site sits on shared hosting with two hundred others. On Thursday a neighbouring site gets a burst of ad traffic and takes the processor time on that machine. Your site does not go down, but it answers in 900 ms instead of 180 ms and the form submits slowly. Nothing in your code has changed.
The same arithmetic runs the other way. A shop with 40 orders a day and two stock syncs loads the database hard at particular hours. On shared hosting the neighbours feel it; on a reserved resource nobody does. So the question is not “cheaper or dearer” but how predictable you want the answer to be in the busiest hour.
The types, one line each. Shared — many sites on one machine, the provider administers it. VPS — a reserved slice of a server with settings of your own. Dedicated — the whole machine. Cloud — resource added and removed as load moves. Managed — any of the above, with updates and monitoring left to the provider.
Why it matters for a business
Hosting decides three things a customer feels: how long the first byte takes, how often the site fails to answer, and how quickly it comes back after a fault. None of them show in a design review, and all three show in the numbers afterwards.
The fourth is ownership. The account belongs in your company’s name, with your own recovery address on it. When the hosting sits in a builder’s account, leaving is not a migration but a request. Choosing the hosting and the domain is part of website development, in your name from the start.
What to ask
- Whose name is the account in, and which address recovers it?
- What are the backups: how far back, kept where, and has a restore been tested?
- Is there a stated uptime, and how is an outage announced?
- What are the limits — processor time, number of processes, database size, traffic?
- Which PHP and database versions are supported, and how are they updated?
- Is a certificate included, and does it renew automatically?
- Where is the server, physically? Distance to your visitors shows up in the response time.