Building my WordPress Website – Hosting

This is my second website. I built my first website as part of a class project in the summer of 2021. It was a subdomain that my professor managed to allow us to learn how to put together a simple website. Overall, I was pretty proud of it, but I knew I could do better.

This summer, I will be taking another class with the same professor. I already know that there’s going to be another WordPress project, based on what he told us last year and what I have heard from other classmates. I’m stoked, but I wanted to have more control over the website this time.

My first decision to make was to choose what kind of hosting I would need in order to store my website on the web.

What is Hosting?

First of all – the domain is the address that people use to find your website. Once your domain name is purchased (many hosting services also provide this), you’ll need a place to store the files and code that make up your website. Website hosting is a service that allows a website creator to store and manage these files so that the website is publicly available to the internet, without having to own and manage a server on their own.

Types of Hosting

The difference lies in how the website is stored on a server.

• Dedicated hosting means your website has a server to itself. This tends to be more expensive, but more secure and reliable. Your website won’t have to compete with others for processing and won’t be exposed to the potential security issues of other websites on the server.
• Shared hosting means there are multiple websites on the server. This is much cheaper, but has more limited resources. However, less technical skill is needed to build a website. This is because hosting companies provide control panels that help facilitate the management of the website. In addition, the server maintenance is handled by the host providers.
  • VPS hosting is another version of shared hosting. VPS means “Virtual Private Server.” The website is hosted on a separate virtual machine on the server. This is considered a happy medium between true dedicated hosting and shared hosting.

My Choice

Ultimately, I decided to go with shared hosting for this website. I do not anticipate large numbers of visitors and I appreciate the more managed environment while I’m learning about developing and managing a website. If this website becomes successful beyond my expectations, the hosting provider I have chosen makes it easy to upgrade the service when I need to. Eventually, I hope to get the opportunity to develop a website with dedicated hosting.