Hosting with website builders
A website builder is a hosting service that lets beginners who need to build a website, yet lack the technical skills and knowledge, build one. They provide a web browser-based interface to build a website and host a website.
Often, there are tiered packages to choose from. Basic packages offer enough disk space and bandwidth for personal and small websites. They might also include a free domain for the first year, 1 email address and some extras such as website analytics. Business plans can offer enough disk space and bandwidth to power more heavy duty sites. Extras vary between providers, they typically include multiple email address, backups, e-commerce support, SSL and more. While hosting with a website builder may cost the same at first glance, the lack of flexibility and the price of add-ons can prove to be a burden.
Keep in mind that website builder services specialise in creating simple software to build websites and web hosting providers are experts in web hosting. Given their areas of expertise, website builder hosting isn’t comparable to that of a web hosting provider.
Another issue with website builders is the type of hosting they provide - most offer shared hosting, the most basic form of hosting available. Imagine your website takes off and you need to upgrade to a superior hosting plan such as VPS, cloud or dedicated servers that properly accommodate bigger websites and higher traffic.
If this was the case, you would have no choice but to migrate from the web builder to a traditional web host. Migration can be a complicated process if your site builder doesn’t have the expertise in-house to do it for you. On the other hand, if you use traditional hosting, migrating from one hosting type or another, or even from host to host, is far less complicated.