Building a website for a blog or for business is not an easy thing to do especially if you want to do it by yourself. For some experienced website users, there a lot of solutions or applications that can be used to speed up the building of the websites. However, for newbies and inexperienced internet users, website building is a relatively new environment that needs to be learned and familiarized to come with the best website for the business.
When you try to build a website, it is important to know the difference between a web hosting and website builder. The simplest way to explain and compare the two is to think about real estate. Every house needs a plot of land to sit on, whether that land is in your name or the bank’s name. You can use a developer who constructs a house from a series of templates with your customizations. You also can buy a piece of property and put whatever kind of custom structure you want there, as long as it meets a few basic codes. The same holds true for a website. No matter how it’s built, a website needs to reside somewhere on the Internet. Without an address, there’s no place for it to go.
Web hosting is a lot like buying your own property in that once you invest in a space on the Internet, your website can be just about anything you want it to be. You can build it yourself or hire someone else to do it, but whatever unique properties you want can be written in.
A website builder is much like a developer. Not only are they providing you the space and a name for your website, but these types of softwares are also building it for you, typically from a premade design with a few personalized customizations. Website builders can give your website a domain and host your site, but there are usually limitations such as how many megabytes or gigabytes of space and storage you get and how many visitors per month the site can handle.
Web Hosting
Strengths:
Once you fork over funds for your own plot of the Internet, there are virtually no limits to what you do with it. As long as you have the coding abilities from yourself or someone else, the sky is the limit for what your site looks like. You can also scale the size and scope of your site easily in terms of storage space and bandwidth. That doesn’t only mean buying larger, more costly packages. Of course. Most web hosting sites can scale your site up or down for specific periods of growth or recession. Some web hosting sites come with their own website builders as well. They are typically more robust than the competition, offering more one-click installation modules for experienced coders to install a la carte.
Weaknesses:
There’s a steep incline, both skill-wise and financially, to using a web hosting site successfully. Learning the coding skills to build your own professional site is a tremendous workload to take on. Hiring someone to do the same can be a pricey endeavor for a small business. Less expensive forms of hosting, like shared hosting, exist, but they are far less favorable. Shared hosting is reasonably priced, but involves multiple websites sharing the same server, and thus competing for resources like bandwidth and storage space.
Website Builder
Strengths:
Website builders are intuitive, meaning they can quickly present you with the choices related to building a site. They are the best choice for people with a lack of coding experience or the budget to hire someone else for the job. Instead of having a new website owner choose every single detail from scratch, website builders present popular themes and templates. From there, users can customize things like fonts, colors, text, and images to make the site uniquely theirs.
Weaknesses:
Some website builders offer to build your site, but don’t have anywhere for you to put it. Others do offer web hosting capabilities as part of the package. Wix and Squarespace fit this mold, but they usually have limitations on how much space and storage you can have. Another restriction is how much bandwidth you are entitled to each month for people to visit and download information from your site. Additionally, websites created by a builder may end up on a specific platform, which could make it difficult to make edits or improvements in the future. In this situation, customizations or scaling might also be a chore.
Bottomline
Knowing the difference between website builder and web hosting will come a long way in making important decisions on your website. It is all about learning what is best suited for you and for the website.
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