What is web hosting? How does it work?

If you’re looking to launch your website on the internet, you will need some form of website hosting. You may be looking to develop your website or have a website developer create one for you. Our article will run through everything you need to know to get your online presence live on the web.

How does it work?

Website hosting is buying online storage space for your website’s files. Data centres filled with computers will hold your files for you.

But how will the internet know where my files are?

Domain names come into play now. Internet users will enter your domain name into their internet browser to go directly to your website.

Their internet browser will then request to see the files. Then your website hosting will serve them.

Think of your domain name as your home address. The website hosting is your house. Your address allows people to find the location of your house.

If you haven’t already purchased your domain name, you can easily register one with us.

Register Domain Name

The variety of website hosting solutions available.

We’ve briefly explained what website hosting is, and now we’ll talk you through the different types of website hosting available to you.

Each website and client will have different requirements.
You may want to launch an online shop with multiple products and photos.
You may be a blogger who mainly will have text-based content.
Each of which has a different set of requirements.

Storage, traffic and cost come into play now. Ultimately you don’t want to pay for something you won’t use.

Here at Clook, we have a set of hosting packages that suit your needs.

The various types of hosting and what are best for you

Shared Website Hosting
Shared hosting is the simplest and easiest to use website hosting solution. It’s great for people just starting on their journey to gain an online presence.

The term ‘Shared’ means that you’ll share server resources with other users on that server. Because the server is shared, the cost is often lower for hosting your website.

Sharing resources with other users can bring with it some complications. If the other websites on that server receive high visitor traffic, it can soak up the available resources and ultimately slow your website down.

Shared hosting is more suited to:

• Small websites (often called brochure websites)
• Low traffic websites
• Bloggers
• Hobbyists
• Portfolio websites
• Small businesses who need an online presence but don’t rely on it

Shared Hosting Solutions

Cloud Web Hosting

Cloud hosting is deemed the most reliable website hosting solution. Your website files live on multiple servers. If one server fails, it will switch to using another server instantly.

Cloud hosting offers a very flexible way of pricing. You can easily upgrade and downgrade your servers to fit your requirements.

Cloud hosting is more suited to:

• High traffic websites
• Websites that need next to no downtime
• E-commerce websites
• Online service-based businesses

Managed Cloud Hosting Solutions

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated hosting is where you have a website hosting server all to yourself. You won’t share the space and resources with anyone else.

The most expensive of all the options available, dedicated servers can come unmanaged (you have to fix and maintain the hardware) and managed (you pay an engineer to run and maintain the server).

These servers are great if you need the server to be configured specifically to your needs.

Dedicated hosting is more suited to:

• High traffic websites
• Full access to server configuration
• Companies that need to hold protected data securely
• Companies that have or can source technical expertise

Managed Dedicated Hosting Solutions

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller Hosting is where you can sell website hosting to businesses and individuals. You will be known to your clients as their website hosting provider. Your hosting provider will manage the server. You’ll cover the support for your clients whilst they use your services.

Reseller hosting is a great way to offer your clients a full service, including website design, build and hosting. Each month you’ll charge them for using your hosting solutions. It’s a great way to retain customers.

Reseller hosting is more suited to:

• Businesses/Individuals who want to sell hosting to their clients
• Being able to provide website support to their clients
• Companies that offer other related digital services

Reseller Hosting Solutions

Email hosting

You may not have a website to host, or perhaps you already use an online web building service. You may only need email hosting, which works very much in the same way as website hosting.

We offer a range of email hosting packages with free migration and webmail.
Email Hosting Solutions

WordPress Web hosting

Over 30% of all websites online are built using WordPress. 455+ million websites use WordPress. That’s a lot of websites, and there is a reason for this.

WordPress is easy to host, set up, maintain and update your content.

WordPress hosting server in-essence is still like any other hosting server hardware. They are configured and optimised to run WordPress and come with built-in features such as WP-Toolkit, One Step Installation and popular WordPress Plugins.
WordPress Hosting Solutions

E-commerce Web hosting

With the growing popularity of self-hosted online shops, you have a few platforms to choose from.

Platforms like Magento, Woocommerce, Prestashop and Opencart will need website hosting. Woocomerce is one of the most common e-commerce solutions. Needing WordPress to run it, WooCommerce has become a great way to get your shop online quickly.

Like WordPress hosting, you can purchase hosting geared towards running e-commerce platforms.
E-Commerce Hosting Solutions

Choosing the right packages

We’ve covered a lot of ground in learning what website hosting is. You may now be a little bit closer to knowing what you need.

Areas you now need to consider are:

• Disk Space – how much will I need
• Bandwidth – how much traffic I hope to receive
• Reliability – Is support available 24/7
• Noisy neighbours – What other websites are on the server
• Performance and speed – Do the server specs meet your requirements.
• Keeping your data safe – Does the hosting provider have all the relevant accreditations? How long has the hosting provider been in business?

WHM & cPanel

Signing up for website hosting will allow you access to a server control panel. Usually accessed online, this is where you can control many aspects such as managing files, configuring domains, setting up email accounts and many more.

There are few control panels, and we use the best, cPanel.

We’ve used cPanel on our servers since 2002 when we became a Partner NOC. As the industry-leading control panel software, cPanel comes with all the features you need to manage your web hosting service including:

• Create and manage email inboxes, webmail, forwarders and filtering.
• Manage domain names, aliases and redirects.
• Setup databases and manage them using phpMyAdmin.
• Upload files using FTP accounts or the integrated File Manager.
• Use Git to manage version control on your files.
• View account backups and initiate file or directory restore.
• View account statistics such as traffic stats, disk usage, bandwidth usage, and resource usage.

LiteSpeed

We include LiteSpeed with all our website hosting packages making typical websites load up to x20 faster than Apache.

Combined with LSCache caching system, your web pages will load quickly, allowing accounts to handle more traffic and helping achieve better search engine rankings.

Summary

Reaching the end of this article you will now have a better understanding of ‘what is website hosting’. If you’re looking to create your website or you’re a digital agency looking for a better hosting provider, we’d love to hear from you.

We’ll discuss which hosting solution is best for you and give you free guidance.