The choices you have to make regarding hosting your website, obviously include the web hosting company, however, beyond making that decision, you also need to determine which sort of hosting you require. The reason for this is that your website’s size, its complexity, its popularity in terms of visitor numbers, what functions it has, and the type of business the website represents will all influence what is the most appropriate type of hosting for your website.
In the main there 5 types of web hosting that should cover the vast majority of websites in the sense that one of them will be suitable. Not all hosting companies will offer all 5 of these and it might be the case that they only offer two or three. You also need to factor in the possibility or even the likelihood that your business grows and as such, you need to expand your website.
At that point, the type of hosting most suited to it may need to change, and if the most suitable type is not offered by your current hosting provider then you have the task of choosing a new one and migrating your website over to them. For this reason, it may be wise to select a web hosting service that provides the hosting types that will allow you to expand. As for those 5 web hosting options, here they are…
Shared Hosting
This is the most popular and cheapest hosting option which usually suits the vast majority of websites. With shared hosting, all files for your website are stored on a server that also stores the files of other websites. Your website will also share bandwidth with other websites too. This can mean that even if your hosting plan offers you ‘unlimited’ bandwidth if there is a lot of traffic visiting the other websites on the same server as yours, it can cause your website’s speed to fall.
VPS Hosting
VPS stands for ‘Virtual Private Server’ and this form of hosting is a bit of a hybrid between shared hosting having a dedicated server, which we will look at next. In effect, your website is sharing a server with other websites, but its shares it with far fewer than normal shared hosting, and in terms of configuring your hosting settings, you have much greater control. Benefits of VPS include enhanced website speed and performance, plus it is cost-effective compared to dedicated hosting.
Dedicated Hosting
When you have dedicated hosting it means that the server that your website is hosted on is for your use and your use alone. In other words, there are no other websites using that specific server. You can have complete control over all aspects of the software, security, and configuration related to your website, plus its administration. One caveat is that managing a dedicated server does require a higher level of technical proficiency.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting allows you to become your very own web hosting company without having to invest in all the equipment and software development necessary to do so. You pay an established web host company for a set amount of disc space and bandwidth, and as well as hosting your own website, you can sell hosting to other website owners for a profit. For example, you pay $100 per month and sell hosting to 20 customers at $20 each per month equals $300 per month profit.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a recent development, but one which has become extremely popular in a very short space of time. The principles behind it are that there is a large network of servers which creates an infrastructure that can prove lots of disc space, bandwidth, and fast website load speeds, but at a very competitive price.