5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting Before You Sign Up for an Account

 

Web hosting may be the most underappreciated part of the World Wide Web. Everything you love about the Internet—podcasts, memes, articles, tweets, websites, online gaming, Netflix content—lives on a server that an individual or company pays to keep up and running so that you can access it. Web hosting is an invisible yet essential element of the online experience.

If you're considering, say, launching a website, there are several basic web hosting aspects that you should be familiar with before starting the project. Although it's relatively easy to sign up and use a provider's supplied website-building software to swiftly create an attractive, functional front end, there are a lot of related terms and concepts to wrap your head around. As you'll soon see, some of it is confusing, if not outright contradictory. Here's what you need to know about web hosting before opening an account.

 If you've spent any amount of time on a web host's website, you've probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways.