About Web Hosting
Web Hosting: The Basics
An essential step to launching your website is getting a hosting plan. Website hosting provides you with disk space and databases for storing your site files and data, as well as bandwidth for serving those files and data to viewers. In short, your web host enables you to serve your website to your visitors when they request to see it.
Who To Host With
Many small business website owners go with one of the large, reliable providers, such as GoDaddy, HostGator, or Bluehost.
Because they deal in large volume and many of the sites on their servers are among the millions of sites on the Internet that get very little traffic, taking up little resources, they are able to charge pretty modest fees (typically around $6-$20 per month for their basic plans) compared to smaller providers that specialize in serving sites that are more resource intensive, and therefore charge much more.
The volume of the big providers at least makes hosting rather affordable for small businesses and even individuals.
After You Have Hosting
Once you have paid for a plan you are given space on a server and get access to the Control Panel (or cPanel, seen at right), the remote control of sorts for your server space. While it’s not terribly difficult to do the basics (adding a URL, installing the WordPress software) once you get the hang of it, there is a lot going on that takes time to orient yourself around.
For most small businesses and individuals, that time is likely better spent working on your own business. We recognize that, but also recognize the importance of you having complete control over your website’s underbelly. As a result, we offer to all our clients an integrated approach to hosting whereby you can have your own independent cPanel in our management server.
Whoever you host with, make sure you have independent login credentials and access to the cPanel. This guarantees that you’re always in direct control of your website and your business.