Important tips on how to choose hosting for your blog: pros and cons of the most popular ones

Surely many of you have the dream of creating a website. Magari avete già pensato ai contenuti, avete già disegnato l’interfaccia, ma vi manca l’ultimo passaggio: come fare in modo che tutti gli utenti del mondo possano visitare la vostra pagina? È qui che entrano in gioco gli hosting.

Not only does hosting serve the task just mentioned, but it is also the key to making your site shine, elevating it above the competition. In fact, they handle a number of technical factors that are perhaps less conspicuous than things like graphics or article content. Let's see why.

How hosting works and which ones to choose

Una pagina web in sé è soltanto un insieme di semplici file. Non basta avere un sito salvato nel proprio computer perché esso possa essere visto dagli altri utenti di internet. Bisogna che esso sia caricato su un server dedicato, capace di rispondere alle richieste di download e di upload da parte di utenti potenzialmente in tutto il mondo. Ed è proprio questo il servizio offerto dagli hosting: spazio su un server con abbastanza potenza da interfacciarsi col mondo.

But what is offered by the provider does not end there, otherwise the many different offerings that exist would not be explained. To be adequate, a hosting must guarantee visitors to your page a user experience di tutto rispetto, che li invogli a diventare visitatori assidui. Non solo: un alto grado di soddisfazione degli utenti è associato ad un punteggio SEO elevato. If this information have been helpful to you, you can find more here. This is a list of the most popular hosting, as well as their pros and cons. However, it can be difficult to understand what precisely makes one superior or inferior to the other, or how important certain features are and possibly which ones to give up in order to grab the best deal. Here we explain all the features offered and how they affect your page.

The disk space

As already mentioned, the main task of hosting is to host your site so that it is available to everyone. Obviously, the more space you are given, the greater the content of the page can be: on the other hand, this will lead to an increase in the cost of the package.

Some providers offer, at a lower cost, the option of purchasing a shared hosting. This means that multiple web pages are hosted on the same server, sharing space. Here is all the information on how it works of shared hosting.

A prima vista questa può sembrare un buon affare, ma in realtà può rivelarsi svantaggioso per diversi motivi. Infatti, più cresce il numero di pagine ospitate su un singolo cresce, più diminuisce il numero di risorse che possono essere dedicate a ciascuna. Rendendole così più lente, meno efficienti, più suscettibili a blocchi e a crash. Tutte cose che, come abbiamo già detto, non sono viste di buon occhio da Google.

In addition, there is also the possibility that, unbeknownst to you, your site is sharing its "home" with a disreputable page that posts misleading or spammy articles. Since this type of webpage are penalized in search engines, there is a chance that even those that share the same space will be flagged by Google as untrustworthy. Including, potentially, your own. Carefully consider both options depending on the type of site you want to create.

The speed of loading

On the loading speed of a page depends the number of views. In fact, a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load is abandoned by more than 40% of users. But since 2018, the loading speed of a page has also become a determining characteristic in search engine rankings. Slower pages are assigned a lower SEO score, causing it to drop in Google rankings. Therefore, speed should be a top priority in any quality hosting service, which must be able to offer the most optimized loading possible.

The uptime

The "uptime" of a site is the time during which it is continuously online, and is able to provide its services. It is impossible for a provider to offer hosting that is able to stay online for 100%, but the times when the page is unavailable should be limited as much as possible. There are two reasons: the first is related to reduced traffic (a user cannot access your page if it is not online), and the second is related to the activity of Google crawlers. We have already talked about Here of some crawler-related errors. If a site often remains offline, Google crawlers will have difficulty reaching it, leading to incomplete or even nonexistent mapping. This is another reason why taking advantage of providers that offer a site migration service can be helpful. In fact, during the manual moving of the page from the old hosting to a new one, it may happen that something goes wrong and the site remains offline for a long time. Manual migration services avert this possibility.

Geographic location and the use of CDNs.

Depending on the audience you wish to attract to your site, it is important that you carefully control the geographical location of the server. In fact, the farther a visitor is from the server, the longer the page takes to load.

If you think that most visits will come from Italy, then purchase a server that is based in Italy. But what if you want users from all over the world? The solution is to take advantage of a CDN (Content Delivery Network), a highly distributed network of servers that allows users to view the page while minimizing the time spent loading. For further documentation On the subject you can read this article. Not all providers make CDNs available, so check carefully.

The presence of technical support

La presenza di un buon tecnico adeguato offerto dal provider può essere di grande aiuto per risolvere immediatamente problemi tecnici e garantire la massima optimization del SEO. Gli imprevisti capitano sempre, ma è meglio che siano ridotti il più possibile: avere esperti sempre disponibili con cui parlare per risolvere tempestivamente un malfunzionamento potrebbe aiutarvi a imporvi nelle classifiche di Google rispetto a pagine meno efficienti.