What is hosting and why is it needed?

Projects on the Internet usually require a web server and a database server. A web server is a special program that processes requests from the visitor’s browser and redirects them to the project files. The database server is a program that processes requests to read or write structured project information to the database. Both programs are located on a computer called a server, which is constantly available on the Internet and supports the work with the project.

After the completion of work on the project, the question always arises – where to place it? Usually there is no talk of own servers, because this is quite an expensive pleasure, and it is only necessary for large, highly loaded projects. Therefore, the most popular option is to rent a server from a hosting company.

The process of uploading a finished project to a rented hosting looks like this:

  1. the hosting company rents out its server (or part of it) and gives access to it (FTP, SSH, database server, control panel, etc.);
  2. we upload project files to the server via FTP (or SSH) protocol;
  3. we load the project database through the hosting control panel (or direct access to the database server);
  4. hosting makes sure that visitors can connect to your project and work with it through a browser.

Hosting rental options

Let’s see what popular options there are for renting servers:

  1. Virtual hosting (Shared hosting) is a type of hosting in which many projects are located on the same server on separate customer accounts. This is the most economical type of hosting, suitable for small and medium projects.
  2. VPS (Virtual Private Server) or VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) is a service within which the so-called “Virtual Dedicated Server” is provided to the user. For the most part, this solution corresponds to a physical dedicated server, but with a number of limitations in server resources, and in fact, several VPS/VDS client accounts are located on one physical server. Suitable for medium to large projects.
  3. Cloud hosting (Cloud hosting) – the service is similar to VDS, with the only difference being that you can change the configuration of your dedicated server on the fly, thereby being a more flexible solution. Moreover, the virtual server is located on several physical servers, so it can have a more powerful configuration than even one top-end physical server. Suitable for medium to large projects.
  4. Dedicated server – is the placement of one client account on one physical dedicated server. Suitable for large projects.

For any rental option other than shared hosting, you will either have to hire an administrator or sign a support contract (for example, with us), or pay on per hour basis for support from the hosting company (if any is available). Therefore, we recommend that small projects (websites and online stores) use shared hosting (and do it for as long as possible), since it includes technical support from the hosting company.

Comparison and choice of shared hosting

Shared hosting offers different pricing plans. They have a number of parameters by which they can be compared:

  • quantitative limits (disk space size; monthly traffic; number of sites and domains that can be hosted; number of databases and space for databases, number of mailboxes; accounts with access, etc.) ;
  • qualitative restrictions that affect server performance (available processor resources, RAM size, size and availability of memory for accelerators, etc.);
  • server operating system (Windows, Linux, freeBSD);
  • monthly cost.

Quite often, different hosting companies offer roughly the same pricing plans, making it difficult to choose based on price or restrictions. However, there are a number of more important factors for work, which hosters are sometimes silent about. Here’s what you should pay special attention to when choosing a hosting company:

  • the ability to grow the project within the framework of hosting plans – it is important that you can increase the amount of resources provided, with an increase in project traffic and server loads;
  • actual placement of servers, technical equipment of servers, processors and hard drives used, software used, as well as restrictions imposed by the selected tariff plan;
  • availability of a free trial period to check the operation of the project at the selected tariff and hosting in general;
  • the ability to contact the technical support service (online chat, phone, e-mail, etc.), as well as their working hours – it is important that hosting support worked 24/7 and be able to stay in touch in case of problems;
  • opportunity to select programming language versions, as well as support for the languages ​​and databases required for the project;
  • availability of daily backup of hosted projects files and databases;
  • presence of spam protection, checks of hosted projects for viruses and recommendations for optimizing the project server load from the hosting side;
  • the cost of renting and renewing domains – for many companies the cost of renewing a domain is several times higher than the cost of the initial lease;
  • the availability of SSL certificates, as well as the cost of renting and renewing them — in connection with the massive transition of projects on the Internet to the HTTPS protocol, is now especially relevant;
  • convenience of work in the control panel of the hoster and the availability of the necessary information (project logs, statistics of resources used, service management, etc.);
  • large hosting clients, as well as reviews about hosting and technical support – keep in mind that now hosters themselves leave a lot of reviews (both to reduce the reputation of competitors and to raise their rating), so you should take reviews with a grain of salt.

We recommend SprintHost

There are no perfect hosting companies! Everyone has their own peculiarities in their work, sometimes delivering inconvenience and irritation. I would like to separately note that everyone has problems and you just need to put up with it, but much more important is how often problems appear, how the hosting company reacts and what it does.

We have many clients who use a variety of hosting, we ourselves have tried many hosting companies. We have been using it for more than 7 years and we recommend shared hosting from SprintHost to all our clients. Here are the main advantages of SprintHost hosting:

  • three main tariff lines Vostok, Turbo Bitrix and Premium – great opportunities for project growth within shared hosting, as well as the possibility of further transition to a VPS or a dedicated server;
  • hosting is based in the Miran-2 data center in St. Petersburg, the servers use Intel Xeon E3 / E5 series processors, only fast SAS/SSD hard drives, up to 1GB of dedicated RAM and the same amount for accelerators (depending on from the tariff), Linux OS (or Windows for dedicated servers), two web servers (fast nginx for static requests, and Apache for dynamic requests), unlimited traffic, and no restrictions on the number of domains, mailboxes or access accounts;
  • free trial period for 15 days, with the allocation of a test domain for testing the project and hosting before payment;
  • fast and competent 24/7 technical support available by phone, mail, web chat or hosting control panel;
  • the ability to set the PHP version for each project individually (or for the entire account when using a personal web server) and support for other programming languages;
  • daily backup of all files and databases that are kept for 30 days;
  • automatic virus check, spam protection, free advice on project optimization from technical support;
  • the cost of renting and renewing domains is the same (when renting hosting) – from 140 rubles. per year;
  • free lifetime SSL certificate from the Let’s Encrypt project for working over HTTPS;
  • a convenient control panel with resource usage statistics in the form of graphs, as well as the ability to change the tariff plan and connected services on the fly;
  • among the hoster’s clients are such companies as: Business Fm, Ford, Ulmart, Glonass, Planet Fitness.

Most of our clients who use SprintHost services do not have problems with projects for months, i.e. uptime (time without failures) is 100% for sufficiently long time intervals. And even if problems still arise, then for more than 3 years there have not yet been pauses in service for more than four hours.

All this makes SprintHost an excellent and, most importantly, a proven choice that meets the modern requirements of various Internet projects from a business site to a large online store. Try a free trial and we’re sure you won’t be disappointed!