Website hosting plays an important role in helping your website load quickly and perform optimally.
As a web designer, one of my roles includes website speed and performance optimisation. I include this on all web design packages. However, optimising a website is also dependent on web hosting. If the website is hosted on a budget shared hosting server, I’m never going to manage to get the website to load in under 2 seconds. If the website is hosted on a more premium plan, such as one offering cloud hosting, then I can easily get it to load in 2 seconds or less.
What exactly is web hosting?
Web hosting is complicated to those who know nothing about it. Put simply, a web host securely stores your website files on its servers and ensures your website is permanently connected to the world wide web. In essence, web servers are just like computers, storing all your files, but on a much bigger scale.
There are a few different types of web hosting set-ups: shared server hosting; VPS hosting; cloud hosting and dedicated server hosting.
Most people who know nothing about web hosting choose the cheapest hosting plan, which usually means shared server hosting. Shared server hosting means many websites share the same web server, therefore sharing the same resources. In my experience, it’s almost impossible to achieve 2 second website loading times when the website is hosted on a shared server.
The next best options are VPS hosting and cloud hosting. VPS Hosting is where a section of the web server is virtually partitioned off for your website. This type of web hosting offers great performance, and plans are not much more expensive than shared web hosting.
Cloud hosting is by far my favourite type of web hosting. For my own website, I use Cloudways. My plan only costs US$10 per month, and yet I’m now experiencing one second website loading speeds. It’s incredible. This type of web hosting is more technical to set up – much more so than the plug and play options offered by shared web hosting providers. But it’s so worth it. Any good web designer will be able to help you set up this type of web hosting structure.
