What is Hosting | Understand All About Hosting

What web hosting actually is, in plain language, and the differences between shared, VPS, cloud and managed WordPress that matter when you are buying.

What is hosting?

Hosting is a space in the server where your website data like web pages, databases etc. are stored.

Put more precisely, hosting is another computer connected to the internet that holds your website data. You reach it through that computer's IP address or through your domain.

Some Technical Words Related to Hosting

  • cPanel: the dashboard almost every hosting provider gives you to manage your hosting. It holds the options and features your host has enabled, like FTP, File Manager, Zone Editor, Sub Domain, Addon Domain and plenty more.
  • File Manager: the part of your hosting dashboard where you manage your website files.
  • Disk Space / Storage: how much data you can keep on your hosting, such as images, posts and videos. It is usually measured in GB or TB. Database storage is not included in Disk Space
  • Bandwidth: the amount of data your hosting sends to visitors. In plain terms, it decides how much traffic your hosting can handle in a given period.
    It is measured in GB/Month or GB/Day.
  • SQL Database: how many separate databases you can create on your hosting. Databases store your post data and user login data such as usernames, emails and passwords.
  • File Usage: many hosts limit the number of files you can store, not just their size. It is counted in files. Say my hosting gives me 2 GB of disk space and a file usage limit of 100. I can store 100 files at most, however tiny they are, and the rest of those 2 GB just sits there looking pretty.
  • FTP Accounts: your files live on the hosting, so you need a way in whenever you upload or download a back-end file. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) gets you to those files without logging in to cPanel.
  • Addon Domain: a secondary domain on your hosting. Every hosting account has a primary domain. When you want another website on the same hosting with a different domain, you add that second domain as an addon domain.
  • Subdomain: as the name suggests, a subdomain is like a nickname for your domain. If yourdomain.com is the domain, rahul.yourdomain.com is a subdomain of it.
  • Physical Memory / RAM: hosting is a computer, so it needs physical memory, or RAM, to work. RAM is what lets it run several processes at the same time.

How to Choose Hosting?

Every website or app needs hosting to hold its files. Picking one confuses even professional developers, because hosting does more than store data. It also decides how fast your site loads and how much traffic it can take at once. A fast website has 70% more conversion than a slow one.

According to experts, a 1 second delay in load time can hurt your SEO rankings, user satisfaction and conversions. So this is one purchase worth a little more thought than the cheapest plan on the first page.

Not every website needs the same type of hosting. It depends on the resources your site uses. An eCommerce store full of images, videos and product variations eats bandwidth, storage and database space. A blog is mostly text with a few images, so it needs very little storage and only moderate bandwidth and database.

Some Top Hosting Provider Plans & Pricing

  1. Why we use Hosting?

    Hosting puts your website or application files and data on the internet, so anyone anywhere in the world can reach them.

  2. Who give us Hosting?

    Plenty of hosting providers offer top class hosting on modern servers built for fast, stable websites and applications.
    I have listed some of them here: https://bloggertutor.com/hosting-providers

  3. How many type of Hosting is there in the market?

    There are several types of hosting on the market:
    1. cPanel Hosting
    2. Managed WordPress Hosting
    3. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
    4. Dedicated CMS Hosting, like Joomla, WooCommerce etc.
    5. Cloud Hosting
    6. Reseller Hosting
    And plenty more.

  4. Where Hosting Server Lies?

    Most hosting providers run their own servers, which usually sit in data centers around the world for better speed.

  5. Which Hosting is Suitable for me?

    It depends on the type of website or application you are building.

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Rahul Singh
Rahul Singh

I'm a WordPress developer and performance engineer. I have been working with WordPress since 2017 and have shipped more than 700 WordPress and WooCommerce projects. Most of my time goes into Core Web Vitals, block based development, database and backend optimisation, caching and server tuning, and I write here about what actually holds up in production. You can check my professional background on LinkedIn, and the client work behind it, with its public review record, on Fiverr.

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