Different Types of Web Hosting

Understanding the differences among these approaches is just as important as comparing security, service, expertise and cost among the various providers you will consider. Understanding the different types of web hosting packages, in fact, can help you narrow the field of companies from which you will eventually pick a winner. This article will educate you sufficiently (although more study is always better than less) to choose the right hosting package, and perhaps even the right company to implement it for you.

Shared hosting

Companies and individuals making their first foray into the World Wide Web often sign up for the least expensive groups of plans, which would be under the shared hosting category. As the name clearly indicates, your website will be "sharing" disk space on a server with 20 or 200 other sites. Part of your agreement includes a commitment to stay within a certain, prescribed percentage of the server's CPU (Central Processing Unit) usage. For family sites, small companies and other limited "rollouts," this is usually not a problem.

In fact, shared hosting schemes were originally designed around certain assumptions about site owners' behavior, many of which turned out to be right on the money. One of the many assumptions that has since become fact is that customers simply do not use all the bandwidth (storage) that they've been allotted in their paid plan. The fact is, many people and firms run small websites whose traffic volume only requires a small fraction of that bandwidth. Every so often, a small site will experience a sudden surge of traffic and data transfers, pushing the website use over the set limit. You will want to plan ahead for this kind of eventuality, as most agreement will give your hosting provider the right to "freeze or seize" the website, at least temporarily.

Virtual private hosting

As opposed to the shared hosting plans, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) will set you up with a Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). You will still share server space with other sites, but will have your own environment, or partition, on that server. Individual servers are often divided into multiple, discrete (separate) partitions that run their own OS (Operating System) and can be booted up individually. These can be very important features for many firms. Of course, you will still share space on a single physical server, be restricted to a certain proportion of the CPU usage and have a limited amount of disk space and bandwidth because of the other VPS users.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting is a specialized service that offers the customer such important benefits such as secure, high-quality infrastructure and high-speed connectivity. These costlier hosting packages can be tailored to the unique needs of a customer for bandwidth, storage space and memory, and "renting" an entire server that you do not have to share enables you to run CPU-intensive programs. Your website performance will neither affect other sites nor be disrupted by what others do.

This type of dedicated hosting plan truly is the ideal one for companies with large, complex, media-rich and/or high-traffic sites. The "discrete server" model provides them complete control over the structure, contents and operations of the hosting environment. Not every individual or company needs dedicated hosting, but the ones that do could not make it with lesser hosting packages. Past a certain point of bandwidth, there is no reason to have any other kind of hosting plan.