Podcast Episode 25 – All About Web Hosting, Part 1

Chrissy Rey 0:17
Welcome to website success, the ultimate podcast that turns website zeros into heroes. I’m your host, Chrissy Rey, and with over 25 years of website creation experience under my belt, I’m here to guide you every step of the way. Join me on this exhilarating journey. And you’ll learn how to transform your online presence, attract your target audience, and effortlessly convert them into loyal customers. Let’s embark on this transformative adventure together and conquer the digital world one pixel at a time.

Chrissy Rey 0:54
Hello, website builders. Today’s episode is all about web hosting. But there’s a lot to cover on this topic. So I’m actually going to do it over a couple of episodes. And for this first part, I want to talk about the different types of web hosting that you might find out there on the internet.

Chrissy Rey 1:11
But first, I want to ask the question, what exactly is web hosting. If you imagine your website as house web hosting is like the land where your house sits, without it your house or in this case, your website wouldn’t have a place to exist. Pretty simple, right?

Chrissy Rey 1:27
Alright, now let’s talk about the different types of web hosting. And I’m gonna go through a few options. These aren’t all of the possible options. There are other options out there. But these are some of the most popular options. And if we go back to our website is a house or a housing arrangement analogy, then you can think of each type of hosting as a different sort of arrangement for housing.

Chrissy Rey 1:51
The first type of hosting I want to talk about is shared hosting. And this is kind of like living in an apartment building with shared amenities. So like a shared water heater, and stuff like that. Shared hosting is usually the least expensive option, but it does come with limited resources. And if you know about apartment buildings, you know, you can have a luxury apartment building that’s going to come with better amenities, that’s going to be more expensive. And you have less expensive apartment buildings that don’t come with this great amenities. So you can you kind of get the same thing with shared hosting. So you could pay more for more amenities, more resources than you would with less. So anyway, going back to that analogy, if you are using shared hosting, let’s just say that you’ve got a shared water heater for the entire building. And if all of your neighbors take hot showers at once, then that hot water is going to run out quickly. And once it’s gone, everyone else is going to have to take a cold shower or just not take a shower. And resources for shared hosting are pretty similar. So if one of the websites on a shared hosting setup uses up all of the memory, or all of the resources or any other parts of the shared hosting environment, then the other websites might not load for their users, which can be a huge problem. So because shared hosting does tend to be less expensive. If you’re okay with that using those shared resources, then hosting is good for just getting started. And it’s also good for websites that don’t require a ton of resources. I don’t usually recommend them if you’re doing a WordPress website, which I’ll talk more about in the next episode. But I don’t usually recommend shared hosting for WordPress websites, because WordPress uses a lot of resources. And as I mentioned earlier, some shared hosting is kind of like a high end apartment or luxury apartment building with more resources to spread around. So those kinds of shared webs or shared hosting environments might be a little bit more appropriate for larger websites.

Chrissy Rey 3:54
The next type of hosting that I want to talk about is a virtual private server or a VPS. And you can think of this as living in a in a apartment building, like we did in our previous example. But having your own water heater in your apartment, so you have your own private resources that you can use. And when it comes to a VPS each one is on a single server or a virtual server. And it’s allocated a set amount of resources that are not shared by the other VPS that are installed on that computer on that server. So again, basically you have your own water heater and you aren’t sharing that hot water with any other people but you do still have a finite amount of hot water to use for yourself. So if you use up all the hot water, you don’t have any more hot water to spare, then you’re going to have cold showers or if you use up all of the resources on your VPS then you are not going to have additional resources for the website to load and the website might still not load. Now depending on the host that you’ve got, you might be able to customize the VPs and if you run out of resources you I’d also be able to upgrade the resources or move the VPS to another physical server if your needs grow. And VPS is usually a little bit more technical, not always, but it can be a little bit more technical. And it also is usually more expensive than shared hosting.

Chrissy Rey 5:17
The next type of hosting I want to talk about is dedicated hosting. And that’s kind of like owning the entire apartment building all of the space, all of the resources, they’re yours to use as you wish. Now you can have other tenants on that. So you can have other people living in the building. And they’re going to be using those resources. So it’s sort of like a shared hosting environment, but you’re the one that is in control of all that. And you can allocate those resources. So you can still run out of hot water, but only if you are the people that you allow to use it, use all of it. And because you own the building, you can always upgrade to a larger water heater. So with dedicated hosting, you get an entire computer all to yourself. And it still has finite resources. But depending on the hosting provider, you can usually upgrade or move to a larger server if you outgrow the one that you’re currently on. And dedicated servers are usually going to be very customizable, and they are often great for high traffic websites, but they also tend to be very expensive.

Chrissy Rey 6:19
Another option that you have is Cloud Hosting. And you can think of this, like a network of interconnected apartment buildings with a super advanced, centralized utility system. So if one building runs out of hot water, the system will dynamically pull it from another building that has hot water and excess. And so you never run out of resources, because the system can adjust in real time based on the demand. Now with Cloud Hosting, instead of using a physical server, so all of those other previous ones that I talked about are usually using physical servers that are sitting in a building somewhere, the hosting provider is using a cloud based resource on the internet or cloud based resources on the internet. And with cloud based hosting prices can vary widely. And they’re often on a pay as you go model. So you only pay for the resources that you actually use with your website. Cloud Hosting is really good for websites that have fluctuating traffic, because you can easily scale your resources up and down. So if you need more memory, you need more PHP, you can apply more to your server to your hosting environment. And you’re virtually guaranteed never to run out of resources. I mean, it can happen. But it’s really this, this makes cloud hosting really good for large scale, high traffic websites and applications are resource intensive websites.

Chrissy Rey 7:44
Now just to make it a little bit more confusing, it is possible to get shared VPS like and Dedicated Cloud Hosting. So all of those other options that I mentioned, you can get those in Cloud Hosting. So you could have a cloud hosting infrastructure, but your actual piece of the pie is lives in the cloud or the apartment building lives in the cloud. And you might have a limit on the resources you can use. But in a lot of cases, especially with the the share that sorry, the VPs, like hosting, then you can go over your resources. But they’ll usually charge you if you go over those resources, because they’re paying for the overage that are on those resources. So they pass that cost on to you. And that’s just something to keep in mind because there are some hosting providers that say their shared cloud or VPS, cloud or dedicated cloud so that that is just another option to throw out there.

Chrissy Rey 8:43
Another term that you might hear when it comes to web hosting is managed hosting. And that means that the hosting provider is going to take care of installing, configuring and maintaining the software on the server, which is going to include things like the operating system. So if you’re a Mac user, you know, you use the Mac OS or if you’re a Windows user using Windows OS, there’s usually some sort of operating system, some some sort of like it is usually not mac or windows in for a lot of these hosting providers. It’s going to be Linux or something like that. But it also requires web server software. So there there’s actual software that handles the websites, and the serving of those websites, the database server, and any other software that needs to be installed on there. So managed hosting is kind of like hiring a property manager to take care of your home. And if the server goes down, you can usually contact support with your managed hosting to get them to bring it up. And then in a lot of cases also help you figure out why it went down so they can take a look at the error logs or tell you where to find the error logs so you can see why your website might have gone down. Now the actual application or website in the case of web hosting is usually going to be your responsibility. But some hosting providers will even help you troubleshoot that so just depends on Have you have for your hosting. Now, if you’re in my target audience for this episode, which is the website success podcast, then you probably want to go with manage hosting, because otherwise, you basically get a server either a cloud based server or a physical server that doesn’t have anything installed. And then you have to get it to work. So unless you’re really tech savvy, you know your way around the command line, you’re familiar with Linux and web servers, then you probably want to have managed hosting. If you are very tech savvy, and you do know your way around a command line, then you might want to consider an unmanaged hosting.

Chrissy Rey 10:38
Now, I know this was a lot of information, but as I mentioned earlier, there is still more to cover. But I do like to keep these episodes pretty short. So I will cover the rest of this in the next episode.

Chrissy Rey 10:50
So that’s a wrap of this episode of website success. I’m Chrissy Rey, and I hope you found this episode helpful. Please subscribe, rate, and leave a review, and until next time, here’s to your website success