What Is Website Hosting?
Website hosting is the hardware that powers your website and makes it available to visitors around the world.
In other words, it’s where you store your website’s files and content and it’s also what serves those files to visitors when they access your site (by typing in your site’s domain name).
Every single website has some type of web hosting behind it, whether it’s a big website like YouTube or your friend’s knitting blog.
When you purchase web hosting, you’re essentially renting space on a computer. This could be part of a computer that you share with other people, an entire computer, or even space on a network of computers (AKA “the cloud”).
1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is where many people start their hosting journey because it’s one of the most affordable ways to host a website.
With shared hosting, your site/account will share resources with other accounts and websites on the hosting server — hence the name.
By sharing resources like this, hosting providers are able to keep their costs down and offer rock-bottom prices.
That’s really the only benefit of shared hosting — it’s cheap. Shared hosts also typically advertise high-resource limits such as “unlimited websites”, “unlimited storage”, and/or “unlimited bandwidth”.
2. Cloud Hosting
With cloud hosting, your website gets its own dedicated resources on a huge network of computers called “the cloud”.
That’s one of the key differences between cloud hosting and shared hosting — instead of sharing resources, you get resources that are 100% dedicated to your site. This generally leads to improved performance because you don’t have to worry about someone else’s websites affecting your site.
Because of this, cloud hosting is one of the fastest-growing types of hosting. For example, you might’ve heard names such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. Those are all examples of cloud hosting providers.
3. Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting is a special type of hosting that’s unique to the WordPress space.
You can host a WordPress site on all the other hosting methods, so this is definitely not the only way to host a WordPress site. However, unlike the other hosting types, managed WordPress hosting can only host WordPress sites, which can be limiting in some situations. For example, you couldn’t install your own self-hosted analytics tool (e.g. Matomo) to go along with your WordPress site.
4. VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting is a lot like cloud hosting. The main difference is that your site gets its dedicated resources from a single physical server, rather than “the cloud”. While you don’t get the whole server to yourself, the resources that are allocated to your site are 100% your own (unlike shared hosting).
While traditional VPS hosting used to be quite popular, it’s kind of taken a back seat now that cloud hosting has grown.
Most people will be better off with the cloud hosting approach because it offers more flexible scalability. That is, it’s easier to add more resources to your server if needed (or reduce resources).
5. Colocation Hosting
Colocation hosting is an advanced type of hosting that’s really only used by large businesses.
With colocation hosting, you physically own the hosting hardware. That is, you’ll actually purchase the hosting servers that you want to use. However, you rent space in another company’s data center to have that company power and maintain that hardware for you.
Basically, you get to keep using your own infrastructure but you eliminate the need to have your own physical space for that infrastructure (along with all of the associated costs such as electricity and air conditioning).