There are so many types of website hosting services and hosting plans that one can become completely confused by their vast variety. How to understand what is what and make the right choice of an optimal solution?
As your online business grows, your hosting needs improvement, too. As a rule, free or very cheap hosting plans work for the first six months, while bigger and more advanced IT businesses demand more effective options. The more it develops, the more advanced and powerful hosting is needed.
Thus, considering the type of a hosting plan and some additional services, think of them as the tools helping to improve your online business and to boost auditory.
1. Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is exactly what it sounds like. It means that your website is hosted on one server with some other users’ sites. The main plus is low cost – resources are shared, expenses are shared, as well. Leasing of a “room” on a super server costs about $5-$10, but be prepared to the fact that you will have tens and tens of neighbors.
The biggest drawback of this host type is the impact of the other sites residing on your server. Of course, huge sites with positive reputation may decrease your site’s relevance. But, on the contrary, if your site is the most popular on the server, super server using comes for a very low price.
Shared hosting is perfect for the beginners who only start understanding how all that works and are not prepared to spend a lot for web hosting.
2. Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller hosting packages is something very close to shared hosting with the only difference that it comes with additional tools helping to rearrange and resell hosting space.
Reseller packages provide users with great technical control (most often, a control panel as Web Host Manager (WHM) is applied for management), software billing that helps to make invoices for customers and some other bonuses like the following:
- free templates for websites;
- technical support, e.g. company solves all technical support issues for you, provides back ups, etc.;
- private name servers.
This hosting option will cost you about $15 – $50. The exact price is defined by limits of resources and other features.
3. Web Hosting based on the cloud
This is a new type of hosting allowing many individual servers run together, so that it reminds of one huge server. The main point of this host type is that your hosting company may add more hardware to add to your space and improve some features, allowing you to customize the service. Adding more commodities means making a cloud even bigger. It is hard to define the exact price, because most grid computing packages are paid according to the quantity of resources and features used, so everybody has his own personal price.
4. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
This is one of the most advanced solutions. Although being located on one physical server, virtual private servers function separately. This is somewhat in the middle between shared hosting and a dedicated server. Although hardware and computing resources are shared in this case, they are divided equally, or at least, correspondingly to sites’ sizes or payment.
This variant makes your site totally independent from other sites on the server, which means other users won’t bring down your website, and you won’t have to pay as much as for a dedicated server.
An average price for such type of hosting packages is somewhere between $50-$200. It depends on the CPU and the volume of RAM that you require.
5. Dedicated Web Servers
A dedicated server is a server that is completely yours and is entirely under your control. The main idea is that a hosting company provides you with one physical server that is not shared with anybody else. You are free to configure server designation, run applications, and customize software and hardware the way you want.
But the prices are quite high: a dedicated server comes from $100 and more. And if you are considering a dedicated server, be prepared to pay for system administrators’ help who will solve technical issues and monitor your server’s performance 24/7/365 to ensure its flawless work.
6. Collocation Web Hosting
If you are collocating, you rent some space from a data center to boost your own server with power and hardware options as well as cooling, physical security, and also internet uplink. In this case you have to take care about server software, volume of data storage, back ups, etc. And the main disadvantage is that in case of hardware malfunctioning you are responsible for repairing or replacing it and server back ups together with its full restoration.
If you don’t know much about server technical works and have no one to help you with that, there is no point in ordering this hosting time. Colocation is not the best idea for minor Internet businesses.
7. Self Service Web Hosting
If you have a lot of knowledge and experience, you can try running and serving a server on your own. You will have to find and buy the servers, take care about all the software, starting from installation and finishing by updating. You will have to ensure there is sufficient cooling in the room where the machine is located, and care for redundancy. Thus, you will have to be responsible for the following:
- server hardware;
- back ups and power;
- system administration;
- cooling;
- data center space;
- bandwidth;
- data integrity and some other features.