A website is simply a set of web pages that are located on a computer which is connected to the internet 24 by 7. This makes the website accessible to anyone from across the globe. You can simply host these pages on your own computer and keep it switched on all day long, but it would not really be cost effective. Moreover, you will need to spend thousands of dollars on power backup, cooling, and most importantly, computational power. You see, your computer needs to be able to handle all the hundreds or thousands of visitors to your site and be able to provide each of them, a copy of your site without any lag or glitch. As you can see, this creates a problem.
This is where hosting providers come in – see here for more information. These are companies who set up large computing facilities called server farms and offer a portion of it for you to use to host your website, in exchange for a monthly fee. This distribution of the hosting cost among several thousands of people makes it extremely cost effective. Moreover, the high computing power offered by the providers enables your website to run smoothly as well.
It is very important to choose a good hosting provider for your website. This is because it is actually very difficult to migrate your site to a different hosting provider once your website is live. Your hosting provider’s capability directly determines the speed of your website.
Website Speed is an important aspect of Technical SEO and is constantly monitored by Search Engines like Google. In fact, Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights, to check the speed of your site and automatically suggest ways to improve it. Although, there are ways to reduce your website’s load time by using things like browser cache, the speed of your web hosting provider’s server lies at the heart of your website’s performance. A quick glance at the average load times of the top ten websites for any search on Google is enough to realize that Page Speed directly co-relates with Ranking.
One problem that webmasters often face is that they underestimate the growth potential of their website. Initially, they pick out a hosting plan that might seem good enough, but then as their site grows, the plan would not be sufficient to handle the site’s traffic. This is why elastic hosting can be a good idea if you’re unsure of your website’s traffic potential. These hosting providers such as AWS, offer a pay as you go service, where the hosting capability increases as more visitors come in and you pay accordingly.