To enjoy online success you will need to get the right kind of web hosting plans for your business. The key to online success of a business is an informative, easy-to-navigate and user-friendly website which is up and running at all times. Today, the market is flooded with millions of web hosting providers, each offering a variety of web hosting solutions for your benefit. But, before you sign up or just any web hosting plan it is necessary to understand what each hosting type entails and how you can benefit from it.
- Shared hosting is perfect for the start-ups and entry-level websites. In this type of hosting, your website gets hosted on a physical server together with many other websites. So, all the domains are going to share the same server resources, whether it is the bandwidth, RAM, CPU, disk space etc. Costs for shared plans are low because resources are shared amongst many users. When you have started a business, or if you already run a small sized enterprise, or if you plan to launch an individual site or blog, this could be the perfect solution for you. With quality shared hosting plans you can get tools like WordPress, site builders etc. The downside to this hosting option is performance issues since you will be sharing server space with many co-users. So, activities in neighboring sites are likely to affect your site. For instance, a surge in resource usage by your neighbors will affect your user experience.
- Virtual dedicated hosting is also popularly called VPS or virtual private server hosting. In this type of hosting solution, a physical server gets divided into many virtual servers. Every such server is independent of the others. You get to run your preferred operating system on the server and you will be responsible for its maintenance. Users prefer this hosting plan when one server must be networked to many users inside the same organization. The virtual private server hosting option is like a middle path between dedicated hosting and shared hosting. It mimics a dedicated server but is inside a shared hosting environment. So, VPS hosting is perfect for businesses which need more resources to accommodate traffic surges but lack the funds and technical expertise to handle dedicated servers.
- When you choose dedicated hosting solutions, you can get a server and resources belonging to it exclusively for your needs. In dedicated hosting, you get root access to the server; you can install custom scripts and applications. You can enjoy much higher flexibility when building a website. In dedicated hosting, you can also decide to sign up for either managed dedicated hosting or unmanaged dedicated hosting plans. In unmanaged hosting, you will be responsible for maintaining the site and monitoring and securing the server whereas in managed dedicated hosting, your host will take care of server management for you. You can count on their round-the-clock technical support, server maintenance and troubleshooting services for all server problems. So, dedicated hosting is perfect for site owners wanting to exercise control over their servers and sites. Since the server is leased by you exclusively, your site is the only site on it. This means you have admin access and full root access to it and you get to control everything, starting from the OS to security arrangements. All this obviously comes for a much higher price and that is why dedicated hosting is most expensive.
- Cloud hosting is currently the buzzword in the hosting world and in cloud hosting you can get resources delivered to you from multiple servers which are interconnected. Here, the hosting solution will work through a network or the Internet and it will allow businesses to enjoy the advantages of a utility service like electricity or gas supplies where you pay only or what you use and nothing extra. You do not have to invest on infrastructure on-site and you do not have to maintain hardware. Resources for maintaining your site are distributed across multiple web servers and this reduces the chances of downtimes because of server malfunction. Cloud hosting is popular because it is scalable and you can scale up resources as your website grows. Moreover, you end up paying for only the resources you need.
- Managed hosting is an option which you will find for most of the hosting options described above. The hosts will offer technical services like hardware-software installations and configurations, maintenance and replacement of hardware, patches, technical supports, updates and monitoring. So, the web host will typically oversee the day-to-day hardware, OS and applications management. For instance, WordPress managed hosting plans which are very popular because of its simplicity. The benefits are many as it is easy to install and even simpler to manage. But, choosing a host for WordPress managed hosting can be a challenge since you need a company which has enough expertise and experience in it.
- Finally, colocation hosting is where you get to house your servers in a third party rack space. You co-locate the equipments and rent the bandwidth, power supplies, cooling systems, security and supports from the colocation host. With colocation, you get to enjoy higher bandwidth as compared to what you could in a private data center. So, colocation is similar to dedicated hosting expect that you have control over the server and it is only placed in the host’s data center facility. Server Colocation hosting is therefore a good choice for businesses which own equipments and servers already.