No business can hope to establish its online presence without support of a web hosting service. Websites will not be accessible to visitors in the absence of the right webhost.
Significance of right host for successful website
An ideal webhosting service provider is capable of providing instant accessibility to websites or web applications to visitors irrespective of their geographical locations. These webhosts are regarded for providing reliable, secure, and affordable services to clients. In addition to this the webhost must be backed by state of the art facilities of data centers that are well-equipped to manage mission critical applications of clients.
Finding the right host is an overwhelming task due to involvement of so many factors and availability of a plethora of web hosting service providers. Assuming that you have been able to choose a perfect service provider for hosting your website, you are still required to select right type of hosting such as shared hosting, VPS hosting or dedicated hosting.
Brief review of shared hosting
Shared hosting offers an economical way of web hosting where hundreds of users are sharing resources of a single server to run their websites. The multi-tenant arrangement of hosting is probably the most popular among website owners due to its remarkable affordability.
Websites of small businesses, startups, and individuals significantly benefit from shared hosting since their limited resource requirements can be easily catered to in a sharing environment. Every website in shared hosting is allocated shared resources of bandwidth, database, disk space, and CPU to name a few.
However, any given website in shared hosting has to consume only those resources that are allocated in addition to limited email accounts As well as FTP accounts. If the business website is about to grow in size and number of visitors, then it will find shared hosting to be limiting its performance. This underlines the need to move to a higher level of hosting that can provide greater resource availability.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting
VPS hosting is the fastest growing solution in terms of its adoption by new and growing businesses. Affordability of multi-tenant environment combined with availability of dedicated resources and privacy of dedicated hosting are the most significant attributes of VPS hosting.
Virtual private servers are built by virtual compartmentalization of a single server unlike physical segregation of the server as seen in shared hosting. The compartments are able to provide dedicated resources of operating system, disk space, and bandwidth to every individual Virtual Private Server. These containers or compartments act as mini-dedicated servers to support incremental resource requirements of websites.
VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting in only one aspect of multi-tenancy. It offers amazing privacy and root access in addition to security. There is no possibility of your website suffering from other resource hogging or spamming websites due to privacy of VPS server hosting environment unlike shared hosting.
VPS hosting provides freedom to customize the hosting environment and resources so that users are paying only for the resources that are actually being consumed. Scalability is an added advantage of VPS hosting that helps support business growth as well as expansion plans. Website performance is much better in VPS hosting than shared hosting due to minimum load on the server.
However, VPS hosting does have some limitations since every website is technically sharing the space. It is observed that many VPS providers are not providing sufficient volumes of resources during peak times. Hence you need to choose the right service provider that can assure optimum resource availability.
Dedicated server hosting
If you need a premium hosting solution that can support your website with maximum resource availability, complete freedom of server management and root access to server resources, unmatched privacy and security of hosting environment, then you need dedicated hosting. It is the most expensive type of hosting that guarantees complete autonomy of a single dedicated server that is reserved for a single privileged user.
Users of dedicated server hosting have total control of hosting environment in their hands with support and choice of configuration of all vital resources including hardware, software, operating systems, and more.
There are few limitations of dedicated hosting such as availability of in-house technical experts for server management in case of unmanaged dedicated hosting. It is the costliest type of hosting and can be afforded by large corporate clients.
It is difficult to make a blanket statement regarding appropriateness of type of hosting for all varieties of websites, because every type of hosting can cater to specific requirements. If you are going to host a small business or individual website and do not need large volumes of resources due to limited traffic, than a shared hosting solution can fit the bill. However, as your resource needs escalate causing downtime and slow page loads, you need to think of either a VPS or dedicated hosting option.
In conclusion
Online success and incessant availability of your business solely depends on your choice of hosting as well as hosting service provider. Therefore you need to spend time to analyze your hosting needs and to find a reliable hosting provider that is backed by a sound reputation of providing robust technical support and high uptime guarantee for flawless performance of your website.