Best Website Hosting Services UK

What is Website Hosting?

Creating a website for the first time can seem complicated, with a lot of strange new words and potential costs you did not expect. Thankfully, here is a quick article that will help you understand website hosting and begin living your online dream.

A Simple Definition

A website hosting service (or a web host for short), is a company that stores all the files that make up your website and then makes it viewable to anyone online who wants to visit. Put simply, website hosting takes your shiny new website and makes it possible for anyone in the world to see it.

How it Works

Finishing your website is exciting, regardless of whether you got someone else to make it, or you made it yourself using an online website builder. For those of you that used a web host’s website builder, you are just a few clicks away from getting your site online. For the rest of you, you will need to upload your website files to your chosen website hosting service. But what happens when you have uploaded your site to the web host and clicked to go live?

Once you have done this, the web host will then store your website on a server that is always switched on, and always connected to the internet. This means that your site is available to potential customers and readers 24/7. Not only that, by using fast SSDs and caching (temporary files), they help your website to load super quickly – especially if you choose a good web host.

There is, however, one last thing you will need for this to work – a domain name (a web address). If you already have one, great. If not, don’t worry because web hosts often offer this too.

Types of Website Hosting Services

There are a few different ways that a website host can store and share your website. However, they only really offer two different kinds of web hosting services to customers:

1. Free Web Hosting – Free is everyone’s favourite price, right? Most web hosts will offer free web hosting packages that are great for those of you looking to get your website online while minimising the costs. There are, however, a few catches. By far the biggest is having the web hosts branding on your site, as well as no control over what advertising they may place there. Some will also sometimes offer free domain names, but in the same vein, their name will be in your web address. There are a couple of other major downsides too, the limited amount of data and bandwidth that makes it impossible to have a large website or ecommerce site on a free plan. And, the lack of customer support, which is a big bonus if this is your first website.
2. Paid Web Hosting – On the flip side, if you pay for web hosting, you often get a lot more. This could be things like unlimited data and bandwidth, email accounts with your website in them, the freedom to choose if you have advertising on your site, if so, with who. Web hosts often offer set plans targeted at specific users, for example, a personal plan (for a small personal website or blog), a business plan (for smaller companies and ecommerce stores, and an enterprise plan (for large organisations).

Now you know what web hosting is, the only thing left to do is choose which website hosting service is best for you.

FTP Hosting

This is the standard website hosting service that you can get. FTP stands for file transfer protocol and is the method used to load your site to the host. This goes back to the very first days of the internet and how the majority of people built websites then. FTP hosting requires you to build your website using HTML.

Once you have created the pages for your site with an HTML editor, FTP allows you to load the pages from your computer onto the host. This is still offered by a lot of different hosts, but if the idea of creating your page in HTML is a little daunting there are some easier ways to do it.

Built in Site Editors

Some hosts will offer an in built site editor with their hosting packages. This means that website owners will be able to create their websites directly through the hosting package that they purchase. While this may be easier for the less technically minded people out there, they can sometimes lead to layout issues in the future. However, if people want a quick and easy to use method of creating a website, then built in site editors are a great tool.

They are also a great way to get a template created very quickly and then people can use a more complex tool to add some tweaks to make it a better site. Most of the big website hosting companies offer a built in site editor in the modern world and they are much more user friendly than they were when website hosting was first becoming common.

WordPress compatible

WordPress is one of the most common ways to build a website these days. In fact more than a quarter of all websites are created using WordPress. It’s important to check whether the hosting package that you have chosen offers WordPress support. WordPress is almost a cross between a website building tool and HTML design.

It offers a powerful creation system but also allows for the customisation of the layout using code. It means that it is perfect for all levels of user. This is why it is so popular and why for new websites that are just starting out it’s one of the best ways to get going. If you want to use WordPress then it is very important to check that you’re able to when choosing your hosting package.

Email support

If you’re running an online business, then it’s always good to see if you get a custom email address with your hosting package. This will allow you to look more professional when running your business. Not all website hosts offer this service and some that do will charge extra to do so. Make sure you check the terms and conditions first.

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