Hosting Explained

The second, technology piece behind this is hosting. Every website has a hosting account. What hosting provides is a place in the cloud that you rent, that stores all the files that make up your website. That would be your images, your text, and your actual website look and feel all the colors. Everything to do with your website is stored in a hosting account. Some platforms have hosting included in the price that you pay each month for that platform. Others do not. So you need to know the difference when you're looking at platforms if it includes hosting or not. The other piece of hosting is huge in the fact that there are several flavors of hosting. The cheapest is called shared hosting, and you can buy it at thousands of places on the Internet. Shared hosting is literally what it says. You're using resources, you're sharing resources, you're storing your files with tens of thousands of other people that are on that server. It can be from anywhere in the world. You have zero control over who goes there. Who else is using those resources? It's whoever has accounts with whatever company you're purchasing at. I started with shared hosting. Most start-up businesses start with shared hosting, and I'm here to tell you if you can afford to go with more of a managed hosting account, Do it. Shared hosting could be the equivalent of let's say you've got kids in elementary school, and you're gonna send them to public school or you're gonna home school at home.
Who's going to bring home colder, flu, viruses, whatever's, trips to the emergency room, whatever it is. It’s going to be the people in public school. That is what shared hosting is. It's like public school. If you end up getting a hosting account with your own resources and only your files are stored there and it's in its own little box on the server, so to speak, then that is way better. You're protected from what other people do and can cross over to yours within shared hosting. An example of this is WordPress is probably the most common platform out there to create a basic website. If you are using WordPress and you get your own hosting account, there are thousands of other people using WordPress on your server, which there will be. And say one of the most common plugins for WordPress is contact form 7. It is an extremely common plugin and lots of people use it. So if you don't keep it updated and the updates are generally, like, security updates patching holes, this and that. Somebody hacks into a website that's using contact form 7 and you're using it and you don't have it updated. Now whoever hacked into the site over here that's on your same server has access to the back of the website to your website. And that is what you're trying to prevent. If there's any way that you can afford to not get into shared hosting, do it. It is a very stressful place to be. We'll just leave it at that for now.