The easiest and best ways to host a website, explained in simple detail.
Hosting a website is like walking a tightrope, as there are lots of variables involved. You have to make sure your website’s always accessible yet affordable, low maintenance yet scalable. Get the balance right and you’ve got yourself a perfect website. And it all starts with where and how you host your website. Broadly speaking, you can either host a website yourself, which is popularly referred to as self-hosting, or pay someone else and use their web hosting platform to host your website. For all intents and purposes though, self-hosting doesn’t make much sense these days. Technically, you can host a website from within your own computer. However, just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should. Sure, self-hosting puts you in complete control over the hosting environment. It’s your computer and you can power your website on top of any software stack that catches your fancy. In fact, it is this absolute control that makes self-hosting an infeasible option. Even before you get down to installing your software stack, you’ll need to make sure your web server has a constant power supply, with appropriate power backups in case of outages. You’ll also need a static IP address from your ISP, since most assign one dynamically that changes every time you reset the router. Since there’s no one else to setup, configure, and maintain the web server for you, you’ll need to have the technical know-how to not just install the hosting infrastructure, but also to punch holes in your firewall to allow incoming traffic from the Internet to reach your self-hosted website. Even if you are willing to go through all this trouble to set up your web host, you’ll still not be able to send email. That’s because virtually all ISPs block outgoing traffic over port 25 in an effort to discourage spammers. As you can see, self-hosting a website brings with it a lot of inconveniences. Besides, server maintenance and monitoring is an always-on task that requires specialized skills and if not done well, could turn off your visitors. All things considered, self-hosting is good for small in-house project teams for collaborating on projects internally, but it is definitely not worth the hassle for hosting a publicly accessible website. Hopefully by now you’re convinced that if you’re seriously interested in hosting a website, you’ll be better off using the services of a hosting provider. The hosting providers essentially offer web servers as a service. They offer you everything you need to host your website, usually in the form of easy to use tools, while taking away the complexities of maintaining all the technical infrastructure starting with the web server. But before you get to that part, you’ll first need a domain name, which is the address of your website, such as techradar.com. Here’s our guide that’ll equip you with everything you need to know about domain names. The good news is that many hosting providers will also offer to register domain names and perhaps even offer a discount if you register your domain with them. The thing you need to know about hosting platforms is that there are several types, each with their pros and cons. The most basic is Shared Hosting. With this type of hosting, you and other website owners are given access to the same physical server. Essentially you are all sharing the same hardware resources, though of course you each have your own separate accounts. The biggest advantage of shared hosting is its affordability, since the hosting provider can divide the cost of maintaining the server between you and the other website owners. On the downside though, shared hosting offers a limited amount of resources. To guarantee the same level of service to all its customers, shared hosting providers usually have a stringent cap on resources such as the CPU, physical memory, and bandwidth. On the other side of the spectrum is Dedicated Server Hosting. As the name suggests, this type of hosting offers you an entire server for yourself.
