Have you ever wondered how websites stay up all the time, and how you reach them from anywhere in a couple of seconds?
I decided to explain this plainly rather than drown it in jargon. So it will be short and to the point, covering what you need to know at a basic level.
A surprise tool: to find out which web hosting provider a site sits on, you can use our hosting checker webmaster tool.
What Hosting Means
Hosting is the general name for the service that lets individuals and organizations make their websites reachable on the internet. Think of web hosting as renting space on a server in a data center where a website’s files and data live.
Every website you visit runs on servers that handle user requests and send the site’s content back to the device that asked for it. Without web hosting a web page could not be published at all. Hosting, then, is where a website’s files are kept.
We tested the web hosting firms operating in Turkey impartially and shared the results in we tested the best hosting providers.
How Does Web Hosting Work?
When you decide to publish a website for your company or for yourself, the first step is buying a domain name. The second is the hosting account that domain will connect to.
Buy a web hosting service and what you are really renting is space of your own on a server, with a set amount of storage, 50 GB for instance, and a set traffic limit, say 1TB a month. That space holds every file your site needs: HTML, CSS, documents, videos and images. When someone types your web address into a browser, the internet connects to the web server holding your files and delivers your site information back to the device that asked for it, in the shape you set.
Does the Internet Travel at the Speed of Light?
The question: does the internet travel at the speed of light or the speed of sound? I am in the UK and if I ping a website I know is hosted in Australia, the best ping times I get are close to 320ms. Australia is roughly on the opposite side of the world from the UK, so about 20,000 km around the surface. The route will not be direct, so let us say 25,000 km, which makes a round trip of 50,000 km (ping time covers the journey there and back). Quora
Take that question. The internet is very fast, but how fast? The accepted answer is that it approaches the speed of light without ever reaching it, and it is certainly nowhere near the speed of sound. Transmission speed generally lands somewhere between 0.6c and 0.8c.
Why Does Hosting Matter?
I could go on about why hosting matters, but I will stick to the 2 most important reasons. They fall under user experience and SEO.
Hosting and SEO
Search engine optimization is the general name for the work of getting your page a better position in the SERP results of the main search engines, Google, Bing and the rest.
One of the 3 core areas behind a good search ranking is technical SEO. That covers compatibility with the main browsers and site speed.
For good site speed, the most important starting point is a good hosting choice. On projects that matter, make sure you pick a fast, well established, experienced hosting firm. TTFB and the DNS checker are tied directly to the host you pick.
Note: whether hosting matters more for SEO or for user experience is hard to answer cleanly. It is very important for both, but if one has to outweigh the other, for most firms it will matter more on the SEO side.
Hosting and User Experience
At Türk SEM we look at a web page in 3 parts.
Hosting is tied directly to all 3. A troubled host will fail on page experience, and that reflects badly in the user experience reports. In the end, the experience of your website lowers your customer experience, and that damages the delicate bond between you and the customer.
With all of this in mind, at Türk SEM we serve every web design client from our own servers, on a strong machine with 4GB of RAM in a strong data center in Istanbul. You can find our rates on the web design pricing page.
Types of Web Hosting
- Free hosting: offers basic hosting services and suits non-commercial, non-professional sites, but it is generally low quality and we never recommend it.
- Shared hosting: a system shared by several users inside one server. Because several websites sit on the same machine, speed and security problems can appear.
- VPS hosting (virtual private server): a hosting system split into virtual partitions where each client has resources of their own, RAM and CPU, so the other sites affect yours as little as possible.
- Dedicated server or VDS: a complete server for a single user, giving maximum flexibility and speed, but a more expensive option that calls for some understanding of server management and a little technical knowledge.
How a Website Gets Hosted
- Pick the hosting company: for a site that runs fast, choose the firm after a detailed look at everything from the physical location of the provider’s servers to their processors.
- Pick the hosting plan: once you have chosen the provider, pick the right package by looking at RAM, storage and traffic against what your site needs. (Some firms offer a very low first year and then raise the price up to three times in the second. Research with that in mind.)
- Change the DNS: log into the panel where you bought the domain and record the DNS details of the hosting firm. The domain generally connects to the hosting account within 24 hours.
- Upload your website: now you can upload the site that will open at the domain to your hosting account. FTP programs such as FileZilla are generally used for that.
Closing Notes
We tried to set out as plainly as we could what hosting is and why it matters so much. If anything is still nagging at you, put your questions in the comments below.
Happy building.
