Briefly, web hosting consists of making a website permanently accessible to Internet users via access to a server. As the owner of the server(s), the company you are dealing with therefore becomes the host of your website.
The data that codifies a website (including the HTML and CSS code) are grouped into several files and then placed on a server, itself administered by the host. The data contained on the server will then be translated by your browser to allow the website to be displayed with all these components as it appears before your eyes. Note that additional services may be offered by the web host such as virus protection for your site or a backup service.
Far from being offered under a single formula, accommodation comes in several forms, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses. Either way, the servers will need to have effective bandwidth (at least 100 Mbps, which means the download speed will be around 100 megabits per second).
The different types of web hosting and their prices
shared hosting
Shared hosting consists of allowing many sites (which can even number in the thousands) to share the resources of a single server. As the server is thus occupied simultaneously by a large number of sites, the costs relating to this option are considerably reduced and are therefore between $5 and $10 per month.
Although economically this choice has a certain advantage, it presents a very annoying problem. Indeed, if one of the sites is very busy, it will monopolize a greater part of the memory and will harm, by the very fact, the functioning of the other sites whose loading speed will be reduced.
However, if loading speed is not a particularly important factor in your case, shared hosting may be a good idea. We are mainly thinking here of sites under development, sites whose configuration does not present a high degree of complexity and those with a low or medium level of traffic.
VPS hosting
VPS hosting, on the other hand, works much the same way as shared hosting. The first difference that opposes it to the latter is that the sharing of the server is only done with 20 websites, which is significantly less than in the previous option.
Secondly, this type of hosting avoids the inconvenience of seeing the loading speed of your site slowed down due to too much traffic on another site, because all the sites that are hosted on the server benefit from the same part of memory.
Regarding the configuration of a website, the possibilities are also much greater with VPS hosting, which is a major advantage. As for the price of VPS hosting, it varies between $80 and $450 per month.
Dedicated hosting, for its part, consists of hosting only one site per server, which is mainly used for sites whose traffic rate per month is very high (several tens of thousands of visitors) as well as only for those whose confidentiality of information is vital. In addition, large companies prefer this type of hosting, as it provides high-level protection against potential hacker attacks. As a price, dedicated hosting will cost around $125 per month.
Even if dedicated hosting seems to be preferable to VPS hosting, it is important to know that the best version of the latter can surpass the performance of dedicated hosting, provided of course, that you pay the price.