You’re ready to create a new website, all on your own. There are a lot of hosting choices, and none of them are perfect. But somewhere out there is a hosting service that will suit your needs. In this post we’ll look at the kinds of hosting that are available. In the next post, we’ll talk about specific providers.
Choices
Free Hosting
WordPress comes in two flavors: wordpress.org and wordpress.com. WordPress.org gives you the software free to use on a hosting service of your choice. So while the software is free to use, you end up having to pay for the hosting service and domain registration. WordPress.com includes free hosting if you use a subdomain of wordspress.com (such as mydomain.wordpress.com). But if you want your own domain name or you want more freedom in how your website is managed, wordpress.com will charge you one hundred or more dollars per year. If your site gets popular, you could end up spending considerably more. It ends up being less expensive in the long-run if you acquire hosting, register a domain and install WordPress from wordpress.org on your own.
However, wordpress.com is a great place to start if you want to explore WordPress without immediate capital outlay. Eventually, if you’re serious about maintaining a website, you’ll end up paying for hosting one way or another.
Non-profit Hosting
Some paid hosts offer free hosting to 501c3 non-profits. If you fall into this category, you can often get free shared hosting on par with shared hosting. (See “Shared Hosting” below.)
Paid Hosting
This is the avenue most of us should take. There are many flavors of paid hosting, but they can be summarized into four general categories:
1. Single-Site Hosting
This fits most requirements for small businesses or bloggers. With this kind of hosting plan, you’re given the opportunity to host a single website. Most local small businesses and bloggers get less than 10 unique visits in a day. If you just need information about your business to be available for the niche market you are serving, or want to have a way for friends and family members to keep up with your activities, this kind of hosting will suffice. You have other things to do, so you don’t want to be bothered with the upkeep and behind-the-scenes maintenance of a WordPress site. You just want to add or edit content occasionally on a site that looks reasonably respectable and is always up. Single-site hosting plans vary, but low-traffic sites can often get away with inexpensive options. Single-site hosting is technically a limited form of shared hosting. The hosting on wordpress.com might be a good example of single-site hosting.
2. Shared Hosting
You intend to create multiple websites, each with different slants. You may have one expert blog site that focuses on stamp collecting and another about sewing fleece fabric animals. You might have a non-profit site with multiple campaigns in separate domains or subdomains. But you don’t want to spend a lot of money and you don’t have a full-time staff to manage the hosting if the server goes down. Once again, most sites don’t get much traffic, so shared hosting is a good way to go. Shared hosting is the sweet-spot for geeks interested in tinkering with more than one site, deeper code editing, and some rudimentary compiling, but who don’t want to manage the hosting. This kind of hosting gives you a lot of keys but does not make you responsible for fixing the server if your hosting breaks.
Shared hosting is exactly what it sounds like. You’re sharing resources with many other people. Your files are served from a specific location in a server farm. There may be twenty to fifty other people sharing the same box that hosts your files. You get slices of the ‘pie’ for hosting files and services. On a shared box, everyone must be respectful of others’ crunch time. If you use too many of the services, your site gets too popular or your site attacked by a bot, it may make others sites on the same box difficult to reach. But remember — most sites get 10 or less unique visits per day, so for the most part other accounts on the same box won’t greatly affect the service on a shared hosting system.
Shared hosting comes in many flavors, but further discussion is beyond the scope of this post.
3. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
You know a little bit about hosting, your current host doesn’t give you enough freedom to host persistent services like node. You might use this option if you can’t afford the cost of a dedicated server but desire even more freedom. In essense, you share a box, but your part of the pie emulates a Dedicated Server. You are guaranteed a certain level of service. Nobody else can hog your services. VPS comes in several flavors too, but this is beyond this scope of this post.
4. Dedicated Server (DS)
You get your own physical box with all services on that box dedicated to your needs. Nobody else is sharing your box. It’s more secure. You can run services or install anything you want on the box because your actions mostly don’t affect anybody else in the server farm. DS also comes in different flavors, but again, this is beyond the scope of this post.
For our purposes, we’ll concentrate on Single-Site and Shared Hosting.
Caveats
Shared hosting is not for mission-critical websites. If people are dying or you are hemorrhaging serious money because your site is down, shame on you for not hiring someone to bake you a better hosting situation. Shared hosting is for shoe-string budgets.
All walls fall. All hosting companies have down time. Boxes fail. Mail servers fail. Databases fail. Lines go down. Physical devices last only so long before they wear out. Popular hosting companies are all set up to minimize down time. Often, with shared hosting, if one box goes down, a backup will immediately fill the gap. The bad box is pulled and replaced without your notice. But I guarantee that at some point, you’ll be in the middle of some critical edit to your site, and something will go down. You will be frustrated. You’ll want to take it out on somebody.
Getting angry at your host provider will only give you ulcers. Your best option is walk away from the computer and find something else to do while they fix it. It may take an hour. It may take days. Remember, you’re on a budget, so you’ll need to take support reaction-time in stride. When you report problems, be courteous. There’s every possibility that something you did on your site caused the problem with your site. You’ll be more likely to get useful free advice and help with respect, honesty and humility than if you start name-calling with guns blazing.
If your site has been down for more than a day, you may be tempted to move your website to another host. But in going from one shared-hosting provider to another, you’re likely going to be facing the same kinds of problems with the new host. Many times, if you experience recurring problems like continually-high server load, it’s better first to ask the hosting provider to switch your account to another box to see if that cures the issues. (We’ll talk about this in a future post about server diagnostics.)
Your site, your problem
You’re on shared hosting. Your site was working smoothly yesterday. Today it’s showing a server error. Technically, the hosting is functioning correctly. We know this because we at least see a server error. The host provider has met all its requirements. Very likely your software is causing the server error. There could be a misconfiguration in a configuration file. It could be a badly-edited .htaccess file. It could be a corrupted database. There are any number of reasons a website can throw a server error, and most of them are your responsibility to fix — not the hosting provider’s. Sometimes, you can ask the host provider to restore your account to an earlier backed-up version, perhaps a day or a week old. If you don’t know how to fix it yourself, you’ll have to pay someone else to determine how and whether it can be fixed.
These kinds of errors are less likely to happen on a single-site hosting situation since your site-editing abilities will be more severely restricted. But because you are more restricted, you are also less responsible for various levels of site management.
To sum, if you only need a single site with a single domain and you anticipate your site to be relatively low traffic, you probably can get away with a single-site hosting situation. If you intend on growing a community of people who will be visiting your site or multiple sites heavily, you may want to consider a more expensive shared hosting option. If your site is starting to get thousands of visitors per day or per hour, you probably need to start thinking about a more flexible upscale hosting situation.
Next we’ll look at specific hosting providers.
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