There are many hosting companies and each of them are striving to win your business; so, who do you go with? Like most things the answer isn’t black and white. It depends a lot on the type of website you want to host. Small informational sites need very little in the way of hosting. They consume small amounts of bandwith. On the other hand, large social networking sites need dedicated servers with huge amounts of disk space and bandwidth. So what type of site is yours? The easiest way to tell is to answer these questions:
- How many pages is your site?
- Are you going to have a lot of interactivity or video content?
- Are you planning to sell things?
- Is your site for business or personal use?
Most hosting providers sell hosting in three groups; shared hosting, virtual servers, and dedicated servers.
Shared hosting is by far the most common as well as the cheapest option.
If you see a hosting plan for $10 a month or less, its going to be a shared hosting account. Shared hosting is when you own a small piece of space on a virtual server. The rest of the virtual server is taken up by other peoples web sites that share the same computer resources as you. If another site on you shared hosting account is a resource hog, you may find your site slowing to a crawl. However, we should note that a good hosting company monitors this to make sure all the websites are sharing the computer resources fairly. Shared hosting also comes with a slightly higher security risk. Since your site is sharing the virtual server with several other sites, your all connected. Meaning if one of them gets hacked, your site could be at risk. Luckily hosting companies have done a lot to beef up their security to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Virtual Server – A virtual server is when a portion of a computers resources has been partitioned off and server software has been installed on that portion. There can be many virtual servers on one computer but they act as completely independent units and have no knowledge of or impact on each other. Wait a minute, wasn’t that shared hosting thing on a virtual server? Yes, but this time you’ve got all the space on the virtual server to yourself. Which means, that resource hogs and other sites security issues are not your problem. Virtual server packages also give you more control over the configurations of your server. So if you want to install a new apache module or server language, your free to do so. This is something you can’t do with shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting is very similar to virtual hosting, but instead of having a virtual space you have a physical one. A full computer/server is dedicated just for your site and is fully customizable. Just as if it were sitting on your desk. Dedicated servers are the most expensive and are mostly reserved for very large and processor intensive web sites.
So, if you answered that your site was personal or under 50 pages a shared hosting option is probably what your looking for. If you’re planning a large e-commerce site or hosting a video library, than a virtual server would probably be a better fit. Dedicated servers are always a good option if you can afford them. But, if you’re looking to spend that kind of money and need those kinds of resources, you make be better off buying and running your own server.