If you’re looking to make a WordPress website, you’re going to need website hosting. That’s what this post is for. We’ll start with a general explanation of what website hosting is. Then, we’ll break down the most popular types of hosting and help you understand which one is right for your website.
What Is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that enables an individual or organization to publish a website or web page on the Internet. When you build a website, you have a collection of files, including HTML, CSS, images, and videos, that are stored somewhere your visitors can access online. This place is referred to as a web server, and the place where the web hosting provider is, is known as a web hosting provider. Imagine web hosting as renting space on the World Wide Web for putting your website on; just as you need a physical location to serve your business, you need virtual space to house your website.. Different websites will have varying hosting needs in terms of the resources required to power them.
A high-traffic, high-resource website will require hosting with considerable power to handle the workload, while a low-traffic site will suffice with less power. Generally, more powerful hosting will incur higher costs. You wouldn’t expect a cheap $300 laptop to perform as well as a $10,000 top-of-the-line computer, and it’s the same for web hosting.
The Main Types of Web Hosting In Uganda
Now that you know what web hosting is, let’s go through the main types of website hosting.
1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is often the first step in a hosting journey, as it’s one of the most affordable ways to host a website. With shared hosting, your site or account will share resources with other accounts and websites on the hosting server — hence the name.
By sharing resources like this, hosting providers can keep their costs down and offer competitive prices. Some benefits of shared hosting are its affordability and ease of use (comes with control panels like cPanel). It’s a very affordable way to host multiple websites, making it ideal for beginners with small websites. While the low prices of shared hosting are attractive, several significant downsides should be considered, including sharing limited resources, reduced performance, lower reliability, and compromised security. For example, if the other accounts that you’re sharing resources with are consuming a lot of resources, that could hurt your site’s performance because there aren’t enough resources to go around.
For this reason, many people move beyond shared hosting once their websites start growing, as other types of hosting can offer significant upgrades in key areas, such as performance and reliability.
2. Cloud Hosting
With cloud hosting, your website gets its dedicated resources on a vast network of computers called “the cloud”. Your website runs on multiple servers (in the cloud), allowing for flexibility and scalability.
That’s one of the key differences between cloud hosting and shared hosting — instead of sharing resources, you get resources that are 100% dedicated to your site. This generally leads to improved performance because you don’t have to worry about someone else’s websites affecting your site.
Cloud hosting also offers excellent reliability because it relies on a network of computers, rather than a single point of failure. It’s also easy to upgrade or downgrade your hosting resources, as the hosting provider needs to allocate more (or fewer) resources to your account on the network. Because of this, cloud hosting is one of the fastest-growing types of hosting. For example, you may have heard names such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean, among others. Those are all examples of cloud hosting providers.
Within cloud hosting (among other types of hosting), you can further break the hosting down into two categories:
- Managed cloud hosting– the hosting provider will configure and maintain the basic server details for you.
- Unmanaged cloud hosting – you’ll be responsible for configuring and maintaining your server.
All things equal, unmanaged hosting will cost less than managed hosting because the host is offering extra services with the managed option (and those additional services cost more money).
Generally, non-technical users will almost always prefer a managed solution. However, developers might prefer unmanaged hosting for added flexibility and/or cost savings. However, there are disadvantages to this type of web hosting; for example, it can be complex to understand, and the costs can increase with traffic spikes.
3. VPS Hosting
A single server is divided into multiple virtual servers, each with its own dedicated resources. VPS Hosting is similar to cloud hosting. It’s ideal for medium-sized websites that require enhanced performance and greater control, as opposed to shared hosting. However, it is more expensive than shared hosting and requires basic server management skills. The main difference between VPS and cloud hosting is that your site gets its dedicated resources from a single physical server, rather than “the cloud”. While you don’t have the whole server to yourself, the resources allocated to your site are 100% yours (unlike shared hosting).
Additionally, VPS hosting has taken a back seat now that cloud hosting has grown. Most people will be better off with the cloud hosting approach because it offers more flexible scalability. That is, it’s easier to add more resources to your server if needed (or reduce resources).
4. Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting enables you to sell hosting services to others by partitioning your main account. Unlike other options, it’s ideal for entrepreneurs but lacks the power and customization of dedicated or managed hosting. It’s cheap and scalable, but it offers limited server control and depends on the stability of the parent host.
Reseller hosting is ideal for web developers or agencies that want to sell hosting without investing in their infrastructure. It does not provide the high-end performance of managed or dedicated hosting so it is more of an account management tool and client billing system rather than being used to host high-traffic websites.
5. Managed Hosting
This type of hosting is a special type of hosting that’s unique. Managed Hosting means the provider handles server maintenance, updates, and security. It better suits busy or non-technical users than reseller or WordPress hosting, but is more expensive than basic or self-managed options. It offers peace of mind and expert support, but comes with less control and a higher cost.
In addition to those tech essentials, managed hosting typically includes automated backups, performance monitoring, malware scanning, and priority support, catering to businesses that value reliability without needing to worry about the technical details. It guarantees better uptime and more robust security than reseller and shared hosting, although it sacrifices some server-level access and flexibility in exchange for convenience and expert-managed stability.
5. Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting provides an entire physical server for your exclusive use, offering the most potent solution compared to all others, with complete control, optimal performance, and enhanced security. However, it’s also the most expensive option. It’s highly customizable and fast, but complex to manage and costly to maintain.
With a VPS server, they allocate your server environment with separate CPU, memory, and storage, ensuring uncompromised performance under high loads.
That makes it better than shared, reseller, and even some managed hosting setups, particularly when uptime, speed, and security are mission-critical; however, the price tag and technical requirements remain significantly higher.
5. WordPress Hosting
WordPress Hosting provides speed and security enhancements since they optimise it specifically for WordPress sites. It’s better than basic shared or reseller hosting for WordPress users, but less flexible than managed or dedicated hosting. It’s easy and fast but restrictive to WordPress and limited in customization.
WordPress hosting often comes with pre-installed WordPress, staging environments, built-in caching, and enhanced security features tailored to address WordPress vulnerabilities. It outperforms general shared hosting in terms of speed and reliability for WordPress sites. However, it lacks the adaptability of dedicated or managed hosting for running multiple platforms or complex custom applications