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As a developer, one of the most basic things you have to take care of is having a great-looking portfolio website. A website that reflects the excellence of your work and excites your audience.
Building a great-looking, secure, and responsive portfolio website to display your designs and give you a valued online presence is an effective means of promoting your services and reaching potential clients.
A developer’s coding skills are very important but you also have to ensure that your websites are sitting on a solid foundation. This is why it is essential that you select a good hosting company.
Finding a home for your portfolio website isn’t easy – great website hosting comes down to speed, security, and support. For website owners, being able to scale a website, alongside the growth of the target audience and as the resilience to deal with any sudden traffic grows rapidly, is vital. Providers of website hosting services charge different rates going from a couple of dollars every month to hundreds of dollars each month.
Web hosting is the bedrock of any website so you need to choose a web hosting company that offers fast and reliable services every time so that visitors to your website can have a wonderful experience.
In this article, we will look closely at the things you need to consider when choosing a web server host for your portfolio website.
Web Hosting For Different Types of Websites
Each website is different and they all have different needs. Before you choose a web host, it is essential to know the type of website you want to develop. Shared hosting might be ideal for portfolio websites and small blogs, while an eCommerce website would need at least cloud hosting or VPS.
You probably are aware that there are various types of hosting plans on offer such as free, virtual, shared, managed, and dedicated hosting. Let’s take a look at each hosting type to examine the main aspects of each one and reach a decision as to which plan is the best fit for you.
Free Hosting
If you run a quick check on Google, you will discover that there are a lot of free web hosting providers, but virtually all of them have some shortcomings around the services they offer. Normally, free web hosting is provided by companies that are trying to appeal to newbie users through free services, before marketing them to upgrade their plans to the paid service. Sometimes the hosting provider forces text links and banner ads on your website and you can’t do anything about it. Sometimes they suspend the free service and remove all accounts. In this case, the lost data will be irretrievable, and all your hard work just vanishes. If you want to be professional, then it’s better to stay away from free hosting.
This is the most popular plan. It is the preferred option for beginners and small websites and it is also ideal for portfolio websites. It is affordable and really straightforward. Shared hosting has a very simple concept, a server is divided into various accounts that are marketed to individual users. The same server then serves as host to multiple websites, which share the same server software, hardware, bandwidth. Sometimes security and performance issues may arise, especially when one website overloads the system, thereby affecting all the sites hosted on that server. These days, some hosting companies market unlimited shared hosting but it’s not really unlimited; there are limits to server load and the number of files hosted per account.
If your site starts to grow, you will have to think about upgrading the hosting account, but until then, shared hosting is a perfect solution for portfolio websites.
Virtual Private Hosting (VPS)
VPS is essentially a server divided into a few different accounts. The main difference between shared and VPS hosting is that with the virtual server, your account is not affected by other accounts, because the server is designed in such a way that each account has its own server resources and software, and uses its own IP address and bandwidth. Certainly, this kind of hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, however, it can handle websites with high traffic. There is a certain level of technical expertise required to configure the server, but you can buy a managed VPS and forget the technical side of things. The hosting company will provide the necessary support and manage the system upgrades for you.
This is best for medium-sized business websites, high traffic blogs, and designers/developers offering hosting services for their clients.
Dedicated Server Hosting
With dedicated server hosting you lease a physical server. You are allowed to choose a server location, with full control over the server resources such as operating system, hardware, bandwidth, software, etc. You won’t be needing this hosting plan unless your website grows as huge as Facebook or comparable websites. Possibly, you would have to hire a systems administrator if you don’t have the requisite experience to manage the server or you could purchase the managed dedicated hosting plan.
This plan is best for sites that get extremely high traffic every day.
Now that you are aware of the various hosting plans available, you can decide and choose which one is best for you.
How To Choose Hosting for Developer Portfolio Website?
You may have read tons of reviews about hosting companies, such as this Bluehost vs. Wix comparison on Mamboserver. However, for you to get the best services, you need to understand the process of choosing a hosting service for your portfolio website.
Here are the major factors to consider when selecting a hosting services provider.
Performance
The speed and uptime of your website are important if you desire to be successful. So you will have to choose a hosting company that offers the most recent technology and provides a service that increases the speed and reliability of websites. They might be implementing Memcache, NGINX with PHP 7.1, and HHVM or dual-city power feeds for redundancy. They should be running the most recent performance and reliability optimization within their hosting infrastructure.
Features
A good web hosting company should have support for various features. A lot of web hosting service providers support a huge number of the features that the usual small business owner requires. Website developers have exact requirements that might require additional features.
Security
The security of your site is one of the fundamental features of any website hosting plan. The hosting company you choose should apply an array of security standards. ISO 27001/PCI DSS compliance and SAS70 Type 1 Certifications should also be a must. It is important that the servers and datacenter are safe from threats such as DDOS attacks.
Price
Pricing is one of the elements that every web developer should consider when searching for website hosting services. It doesn’t matter whether you are running a large business or a small one, your resources have already been budgeted for. You have to assign an adequate budget to cover the hosting.
Concluding Thoughts
As a developer, choosing the right hosting plan for your portfolio website to showcase your work can be an arduous task due to the myriad of different web hosting companies to choose from. The fundamental part of choosing a web hosting service is to clearly identify and evaluate your needs in terms of performance, resources, and server management. If you follow this guide, you can be rest assured that you will be making the best choice of hosting for your portfolio website.