One of the preliminary phases of a web project is determining its hosting. What is the best hosting for the client, for their type of project? It is therefore our responsibility to propose one or more solutions that meet these various requirements. These requirements include the country where the data will be hosted, security, data availability as well as performance, and customer support.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is one of the main components of a website's online presence, and by extension, the company behind that website. It involves the entire process that makes a website accessible to users on the internet. The data is hosted on servers that are permanently connected to the internet to be available to users at any time. Hosting can offer various features, such as specific databases for certain data, options to monitor the website and its performance.
Several types of hosting exist and are more or less suitable for different projects to offer the best experience to the site creator and users.
Types of web hosting
There are different types of hosting, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting refers to when multiple websites are hosted on the same physical server.
- This helps reduce hosting costs
- However, it can lead to performance drops for some websites depending on traffic spikes on others.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting involves a complete server that is dedicated to hosting.
- Performance is optimal here, and especially much more stable
- Greater flexibility
- More expensive
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
A VPS is an intermediate solution compared to the previous two. It attempts to combine their advantages. A physical server is shared among multiple websites; however, in this case, the physical server is divided into several virtual servers, each hosting a website.
This allows for:
- Better isolation of resources and data
- Still limited in performance
Cloud Hosting
This involves a network of interconnected virtual servers.
- Flexible and scalable
- High fault tolerance
With this last type of hosting, a large category of hosting has emerged, known as platform as a service (or Platform as a Service / PaaS), where the host offers to maintain the hosting platform (basic software, infrastructure...) allowing the client to focus on developing their website. This is the option we most often use for our major projects.
- This category was launched around the year 2014, notably thanks to Docker.
- It later saw the arrival of "serverless computing."
Technical Characteristics to Consider
Several technical characteristics of hosting should be considered depending on your project.
The first, and also the most crucial characteristic to consider, is the computing environment available on your website's hosting, which will determine direct performance. Notably here:
- Supported programming languages
- RAM, CPU, and other hardware
- Operating System (OS)
Nowadays, these parameters are easily adjustable by the site creator, and they become almost secondary, especially with the emergence of PaaS, where technical characteristics can be modified and adapted with just a few clicks.
The second characteristic is security, particularly the use of SSL certificates for website communication to protect exchanges. Additionally, hosting should offer protections against certain types of network attacks, notably DDoS attacks (denial of service attacks), which can render a website unavailable.
But security is not only from a network perspective, but also data security, or rather their safety, by offering backups and back-ups of the data.
And the third part concerns the addition of various secondary plug-ins to configure your website. Here, we can mention the addition of databases, regardless of the type required by the website, as well as the addition of monitoring tools to visualize performance more precisely and adjust the hosting infrastructure accordingly. Some plug-ins or internal hosting features can naturally improve performance, such as a load balancer, which will distribute the load between various servers in case of a connectivity spike to avoid impacting the client's website.
Finally, some tools make life easier for web developers, particularly deployment links between Git and hosting, allowing for easy application deployment while retaining the benefits of continuous integration (CI/CD approach).
Hosting by Project Type
Here are some examples of recommended hosting according to a specific web project type.
Showcase Site
A showcase site is a website aimed at presenting an organization or a product by linking to it. The site is intended to be simple, clean, and lightweight. Here, shared hosting is perfect given the minimal performance the site will require, making it a good way to reduce hosting costs.
Personal Blog
A personal blog will also adapt very well to shared hosting. Generally, the need for an environment that can withstand a heavy load of users is not crucial.
E-commerce Site
In the case of an e-commerce site, the interest will be in shared or dedicated hosting. Indeed, depending on its size, it will have more or less significant needs. This is why opting for VPS hosting can be a very interesting alternative, allowing you to adjust according to the site's needs.
More Complex Cases
In the more complex case of a larger application where a dedicated frontend and backend must communicate to create more complex content and features. This often involves a product that sits behind a showcase site for an organization. Here, the last type of hosting, cloud hosting or PaaS, is the most interesting, allowing for more flexibility, adaptability, and control over the environment's performance while enabling a focus on developing features.
Of course, these are not all the types of sites that exist, but the goal is the same each time: to try to find the hosting that best suits in terms of cost, performance, and satisfaction of the client and end users.
Each Project Type, Its Hosting Type
We could delve deeper here by comparing all the solutions on the market, but we would probably never be exhaustive. No type of hosting is better than another, and the choice will be made based on the project.
Our role is to advise and listen to our clients as best as we can to meet their needs, by choosing the most suitable hosting for their website, or by adapting to the hosting they have chosen.
Finally, our team is increasingly involved in the themes of eco-design and accessibility, notably with our team's OpQuast certification (link to the team). In this context, it is important to consider the ecological impacts of hosting. This particularly underscores the necessity of choosing hosting that best meets the needs of a website to reduce energy consumption and decrease its carbon footprint.