If you are new to web development, you might just be hearing the term “web hosting” for the first. Or, you might have heard and know a few things concerning web hosting, but, have no concrete knowledge of what’s involved in hosting a website and the current demands and trends you need to be acquainted with in website hosting.
As we know, every website, webpage or blog needs a home to live on the internet. This is the part where web hosting comes in. Web hosting provides you with that online dwelling place where you can easily reach out to share your posts, tweets, videos, and podcasts among other web content to your customers and the whole world.
This is just an intro description of web hosting. Beyond this stage are so many quite complicated things to know, and learn in order to have an effective web host that is reliable, profitable, efficient and secure
In this blog post, we will be looking at the basic things you should know about web hosting. We will be exploring:
What is Web hosting?
In simple terms, web hosting is a service that allows you to post your website, webpage or blog onto the internet.
While a web hosting or a website hosting service provider provides you with the digital space technologies and services needed for your website or blog to be viewed on the internet.
Without web hosts, all of your information and web contents would remain stored locally on your computer or mobile phone, and, wouldn’t be accessible to anyone unless you gave them physical access to your PC and as well the login details.
From this explanation, you should know the great benefits of web hosting and having a web hosting provider.
But due to the ever-changing digital world and bundles of information and trends in web hosting. There are many factors and things you might want to compare and consider in choosing wisely and making decisions.
Trends in Webhosting
1. Hosting with SSD
You might have been familiar with HDD (Hard drive devices) used mainly by desktop computers for information storage.
HDD AND SSD (Solid State Devices) are both very useful and important in web hosting as they are both being used for storing digital information and web content.
SSDs on the other hand are majorly found in laptops, utilizing NANO flash memory for its storage. But here is the difference and where SSD stands out among the two in web hosting. SSD contains no moving parts, and thus, it’s more durable (SSDs last at least four times HDDs), efficient and faster.
Web hosting companies now offer hosting services with SSD storage for their customers to save their web files online. The storage increases with an increase in price and hosting plan.
2. Hosting with website builders
Many don’t seem to really understand the different functions of a web hosting provider and a web builder. Actually, you need both as they flow and go together.
While a Web hosting provider provides you with that online home and dwelling place for your blog or website to live and be viewed from, a web builder helps you to set up that house in order to establish your online presence. Either with .com or whatever, you wish.
Impact of Website builder on web hosting
In the early days of the internet building websites is quite hard and complicated with the requirements of mastering coding languages.
But with the emergence of website builders along with web hosting providers, things have gotten easier. Web site builder helps you to build your website without having to learn any coding language.
Another interesting thing is that Website builders come with the typical feature of drag-and-drop software that lets you customize your page layouts and designs with available templates.
Website builders exist in both online and offline formats. A beautiful thing to note is that online website builders mostly come with accompanying web hosting services, saving you time and energy and technical stress.
3. Email hosting
Almost everybody is familiar with the popular free creation of email accounts on Gmail and Co. Email Hosting is similar to this, but it differs as it is a service that enables you to store emails and attachments online on a server. It beats the normal free email accounts in terms of security, advertisement and most importantly the use of your own custom domain name.
Apart from helping you to securely keep your information and documents. Email Hosting helps you to keep close contact with your viewers, clients and subscribers. As you probably know, having a web page with a web hosting provider means you will be expectantly receiving a lot of feedback and emails from your viewers who would love to reach out to you.
Also, you would also love to time to time send them reminders, and information or advertise to them a service or product. Email Hosting provides you with the opportunity to do all of this.
You can wish to set up your webpage email address via a hosting package. Most hosting companies will provide you with an email address included in web hosting. Or you can decide to have a separate provider just for your emails.
4. Hosting with customized WordPress hosting
WordPress is a free, open-source content management system that is built as a web hosting and building environment using MySQL database and PHP language in order to function and make your WordPress-powered website viewable on the internet.
WordPress offers two major services: serving both as a web hosting provider and website builder. This wonderful combo is among the key factors that made WordPress being the most popular web hosting provider and builder in the whole globe.
WordPress-managed hosting Vs Regular hosting
In simple terms, WordPress is any web hosting service that supports only WordPress.
While other regular web hosting services provide you just with the web home to stay, the crux of the work is still left for you to do. Word press hosts usually come free, offering auto updates of core and free plugins, and wonderful tools such as WordPress starter and WordPress Migrator.
It also has the edge over other forms of regular hosts in helping you to keep track of vulnerabilities and offer WAF protection amongst other security services and build solutions that specifically offer WordPress performance and security boosts.
4. Hosting with cloud
In traditional web hosting, your information and files on your website are kept on a single server. i.e they are kept physically somewhere in a server by the service providers. Surprised?
You might have thought your information is kept somehow in the clouds or some sort of atmosphere. Well, you are kind of right because this is where cloud hosting comes in. Cloud hosting makes your website accessible using cloud resources.
How does cloud hosting work?
Cloud hosting works through virtualization. It’s a technology that somehow splits a physical server into multiple virtual machines called cloud servers. Then, these connect and combine to create a single network for hosting a website.
Some of the benefits of Cloud hosting include; High availability and reliability, Flexibility, Security and Scalability
5. Hosting with multi-cloud
Understood that cloud hosting is the combination of multiple virtual machines that gives your website access to the internet. This will lead us further into public clouding. A public cloud is one that more than one customer share.
Multi-cloud on the other hand means multiple public clouds. A company that uses multi-cloud hosting actually incorporates multiple public clouds from more than one cloud provider. Instead of a business using one service provider for cloud hosting, and storage in a multi-cloud configuration they use several public clouds.
What is multi-cloud?
In cloud computing, a cloud is a collection of servers that cloud customers access over the Internet. Typically, each cloud is managed by a cloud provider – a company that offers cloud services. A public cloud is a cloud that more than one customer shares.
“Multi-cloud” means multiple public clouds. A company that uses a multi-cloud deployment incorporates multiple public clouds from more than one cloud provider. Instead of a business using one vendor for cloud hosting, storage, and the full application stack, in a multi-cloud configuration they use several.
Multi-cloud deployments have a number of uses. A multi-cloud deployment can leverage multiple IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) vendors, or it could use a different vendor for IaaS, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) services. Multi-cloud can be purely for the purpose of redundancy and system backup, or it can incorporate different cloud vendors for different services.
Most businesses that move to the cloud will end up with some kind of multi-cloud deployment. A multi-cloud deployment can even come about unintentionally, as a result of shadow IT (see below).
What’s the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
A multi-cloud can also be a hybrid cloud, and a hybrid cloud can also be a multi-cloud, but these terms represent two distinct concepts.
“Hybrid cloud” describes the mixing of two or more distinct types of infrastructure: it combines a private cloud, an on-premises data centre, or both with at least one public cloud. Multi-cloud refers to several different public clouds being deployed, and it doesn’t necessarily include a private cloud, although it can.
Benefits of using multi-cloud hosting
Reliability: By using a multi-cloud deployment, you avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. If one cloud goes down, some functionality will still be available to you from the other available clouds. Plus! public cloud could be used as a backup to another cloud. This is great right?
Flexibility in Choice of Hosting Providers: if a multi-cloud strategy is used, your systems and storage are spread out across multiple hosting vendors. Therefore it’s easier to move from using one of these vendors because the majority of your infrastructure still remains in place during the migration.
Reduction in cost of savings: it enables you to easily pick and choose the most affordable services from different providers.
6. Hosting with advanced security
Without proper security for your website, it is likely going to be attacked sooner or later.
It’s very important to put this as a number consideration when choosing a web hosting provider, if not, you are risking so many things going wrong. You could either lose your website or have it destroyed beyond repair.
Even worse, you could put your viewers and clients in danger too.
In order to avoid all that, you should take care of your hosting security as best as possible. The number one factor here is picking a very secure web hosting provider.
So most web hosting providers now dim it fit to provide advanced security services to their customers.
7. Managed web hosting
What is managed web hosting?
Managed hosting is an act of your web hosting company handling the setup, administration, management, and support of the server where your website files are kept and protected.
Just worthy of note is that it is the duty of your web hosting company to typically carry out functions such as the consistent running of your website 24/7/365 support, network infrastructure and hardware management, basic security measures including virus and spam protection, and monitoring and repairing of anything that could affect the performance of the server that keeps your website. Anything short is this is a breach of the agreement.
Why choose managed web hosting?
In unmanaged hosting, you only have a space on servers owned by the hosting company, but it’s largely a do-it-yourself experience. You are solely responsible for the admission of the server remotely, and that includes being in charge of software upgrades, patching, security, and monitoring.
The decline of data centers
Gartner once predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. In fact, 10% of organizations already have.
In times before, you need to go to a cyber cafe or any other form of a data center to do anything online. But without any contradiction, you will agree that things have massively changed over the years. Any internet or web can easily be done on your P.C or phone from the comfort of your house.
In fact, colocation is the new trend these days because it offers higher availability and reliability, certified building tier levels, energy efficiency, dedicated facilities management and the ability to scale.
8. AI Incorporation
In web hosting, AI is finally getting its time to showcase its role in security and fighting Cybercrimes. A typical data breach can cost a lot to a web host. And this kind of technology can help prevent that in the first place.
One of the beauties of Artificial Intelligence is that it can recognize patterns in data much more effectively than humans can. It would allow security systems to learn from experience. Then they’d be practically improving themselves.
AI as a web hosting tool
Security: A properly functioning cybersecurity artificial intelligence can track threats and use predictive algorithms to enable Web Hosting companies to detect attacks before they happen accurately.
Enhancing customer experiences: AI can be used to create personalized experiences for website visitors. This can help you increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Reduction in development costs: Incorporating AI can help you optimize your website for better performance. In some cases, AI can actually help you reduce the cost of web development. For example, if you’re using chatbots to provide customer support, you may not need to hire as many customer service representatives.
9. Hosting with HTTPS
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules browsers use to determine how to read and transfer data over the web.
HTTPS is the same as HTTP except HTTPS tells a browser to encrypt the data exchanged with a web page. This somehow disguises data and reduces the chances of your web information getting manipulated. This is so important in an online world full of cyber crimes.
It is a trend you find among web hosting companies.
How to set up HTTPS for your website
To use HTTPS with your domain name, you need an SSL or TLS certificate installed on your website.
Sometimes, your Web Hosting Provider may offer HTTPS security or you can just request an SSL/TLS certificate from Certificate Authorities and install it on your website yourself. SSL/TLS certificates may need to be renewed periodically.
There are different types of web servers, and each has its own process for installing SSL/TLS certificates. You will need to find out which web server your website is using and follow its instructions for installing and updating your certificate.
10. Pricing competition
In web hosting, shared hosting is usually the cheapest of all. While dedicated hosting is the costliest.
But there are a lot of options in these categories of hosting with several different types of web hosting providers to choose from, and many variables at play. So one has to be financially smart in order to find a cheap but good value hosting plan to help your money go further.
11. Green web hosting
Green web hosting is a greener, more environmentally friendly way to host websites. Most green web hosting companies aim to provide high-quality services while doing everything they can to limit their carbon emission. (Source: Host Papa)
When you consider that a data centre contains hundreds or even thousands of pieces of mounting hardware, you can imagine how massive the carbon emission and energy drain is. This internet CO2 is very harmful to the general public.
How to carry out Green web hosting
A common way is to produce an equivalent or a greater amount of energy than what is being used and return that energy back to the grid. In other words, recycling energy.
Another way of going about this is that web hosting companies can pass that responsibility to a certified green energy supplier.
Companies can get ‘Green tags’ from certified green energy suppliers to sell. For each Green tag purchased, the certified green energy supplier will add a prescribed amount of energy to the grid on behalf of the web hosting company that bought the tag back to the grid.
Benefits of Green Web hosting
1. Harmless to the environment
2. Less Expensive Than Conventional Hosting
3. Very good for your profile
Host with Truehost Web hosting
Truehost web hosting Nigeria is a web hosting company in Nigeria that offers quality and affordable web hosting services in Nigeria and across Africa.
You can buy a one-year hosting plan for as low as N5, 000 that will give you access to 30 GB SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth and a lot of other features that can’t be found anywhere for that price.
Conclusion
Trends change with time because of competition, technology and development. As the world keeps changing trends also change to meet the needs of people. n We will keep feeding you with more updates, meanwhile, you can host your website with Truehost today.