Why is Web Hosting Important?

Well if you are going to have a spider party… No in all seriousness web hosting ties into your website, be it a blog, a marketing site, a webstore or even an online magazine. The website it’s self is in some ways like a mobile home. It has all of the stuff you see when you pull up a web page (such as this article). Web hosting is the address where you put your mobile home. If you don’t have any web hosting set up, no one will find your website. The web hosting company will have a large amount of servers somewhere and they will store all of your website’s data. Then when someone comes to your web address their computer sends a request to that server to view the data.

It would seem easy to just pick out a company that does this, sign up and pay the bill. But there are a number of things to consider when looking at web hosting options. There are some various options to start with like shared or dedicated hosting. Shared hosting means that a number of websites will all be put on one server. This is cheaper, but if one website takes up a bunch of data or bandwidth your website might pay the price and get knocked offline for a while. The other option is to have a dedicated server. This means you get the whole server for your site, but you are no longer sharing the cost of that server.

You will also need to look at some reviews of the company you are considering. Look at what they have for uptime. This will give you an idea of how many times they have had to take things offline, either for maintenance or due to other problems. It’s also good to get an idea of how their customer service is, so when you have that big problem you’ll know if there are knowledgeable people to help or if you are on your own.