What’s web hosting? Choosing the best service provider for your site

Your website represents hours spent fine-tuning designs, configuring options, and writing content to meet specific user expectations. To ensure visitors get the experience you intended, you need a suitable web hosting provider. A great web host loads your pages quickly and protects the site from digital threats.

To select the best provider, you first need to understand what web hosting is and its basic functions so you can differentiate one service from another. After learning the fundamentals and identifying your ideal web hosting type, you can explore provider options to find the right host for your unique needs.

Web hosting explained

Web hosting stores your website components on a web server to make them available to users who enter the corresponding URL in a browser. Without a web server, your site won’t be accessible online.

Web hosting services distinguish themselves with their security, reliability, and speed. Great providers, like Hostinger and Webflow, secure files with encryption and firewalls. They also commit significant hardware resources like RAM, processors, and hard drive space to ensure millions of users can access a website simultaneously. 

Understanding how web hosting works

Web hosts store your website’s files on a server with a unique IP address. When someone enters a URL in their web browser, the engine uses a domain name system (DNS) to look up the IP address for the URL’s domain host. Then it requests the relevant file from the web server, and the server responds with the file.

For example, when you navigate to webflow.com/designer, the browser uses a DNS to find the IP address belonging to the webflow.com domain host. Then, it sends a request, and Webflow’s server responds by searching for the “designer.html” file, serving that to the user’s browser.

Web servers for busy sites receive, process, and respond to millions of requests daily. If the host that owns that server doesn’t allocate enough hardware resources, the site will respond slowly, leading to a subpar user experience. That’s why the best hosting companies offer traffic scaling to manage resource allocation as traffic fluctuates.

The 4 different types of web hosting

There are many ways to publish a website online, whether you use your own hardware or pay a web hosting service for theirs. In either case, the requirements are the same: you need a domain name, a server that stores the files, and hardware that processes requests. 

Here are the four primary types of services that web hosts offer.

1. Shared hosting

Web servers often have massive hard drives, much larger than one website could fill. So large web hosting services, like Hostinger and HostGator, tend to store multiple sites on each server. The only downside is that the sites share processors and RAM. A well-equipped hosting service can allocate more hardware as needed, but if you’re hosting multiple sites on your own server, you’re limited by the server’s hardware.

2. VPS hosting

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is similar to shared hosting, but the hardware resources aren’t openly shared. Instead, VPS hosting splits up a web server’s RAM and processors to dedicate a portion to each site. The server’s hard drive stores site files in segments called partitions.

3. Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting takes shared hosting to the extreme. It involves renting or creating many virtual cloud servers and treating them as one large pool of resources. These hosts store files on multiple servers and allocate their virtual hardware as needed to suit the traffic requirements of one or multiple sites.

4. Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting is typically how people host websites on their own servers. It’s expensive to rent a dedicated server from a web hosting service because assigning a whole server to one client isn’t cost-effective. 

With dedicated hosting, you control everything that goes onto the server, including the OS and security configuration. If you own the server, you can upgrade the hardware yourself, but if you’re renting a dedicated server, you’re limited to the hardware the provider allocates to you.

How to choose a web host for your site

There are many web hosting companies, and most offer the same primary features: generous server space, robust hardware resources, and top-notch security features.

The difference lies in how reliable those features are. The best providers have near-perfect uptime, impeccable security, and helpful support teams standing by.

Before researching your options, consider how you’re crafting your website. If you’re using website builders like Webflow, leverage its hosting feature to save the time and effort you’d spend exporting files and reuploading them to a third-party service. 

If you’re not using web design software, you have many host options to choose from. You can still upload your website to Webflow or hire a specialized provider like Bluehost, which offers shared, cloud, or VPS hosting. 

When selecting a web hosting provider, consider the following features:

• Bandwidth allocation — How much data a host can transfer to and from the server(s) at once. Bandwidth information usually appears in a hosting service’s pricing tiers, represented as either “unlimited” or by a number of megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) per second.
• Uptime — Uptime represents the percentage of time websites are live and accessible. The average uptime should be 99.99%. Anything less means the hosting service has occasional hiccups.
• Speed — The speed at which a host serves pages is critical for a good user experience. Use a test tool like PickupHost to compare the speeds of different hosting providers. Anything under 50ms is excellent.
• Security record — You always want your site to be safe from digital threats like DDoS attacks and ransomware. Research website hosts on security report sites like UpGuard to determine their security effectiveness.

Host with Webflow and start creating

To create a reliable and lasting website, selecting the right hosting platform from the start is essential. Here’s how Webflow measures up to the criteria above:

Best of all, Webflow is also a premier design platform, so you can craft, host, and maintain your site all in one place. To begin designing your website with Webflow, learn how to structure your site. Explore Webflow University for interactive courses and lessons that’ll help you create, optimize, and launch your site — no code needed.