Web Hosting Choices Made Easy (James Clarke)
Aug 25, 2010
The terminology used in web hosting can often be confusing for the person not conversant with the current buzzwords. What follows is a basic breakdown of types of hosting types and the differences between them. No type is essentially better than any other type but each fits different needs and levels of growth.
While almost every type of hosting package will usually fit some business, the exception might be the free hosted sites. The primary feature to these is that they are free and they usually have very simple tools that will allow an individual to get a website up and running quickly. However businesses may find that free hosting may not have the tools they need for ecommerce and with many of them the site owner can not even use their own domain name.
These free or community sites are usually avoided by businesses because they tend to be a dead end. It is often a case where the site owner will have to build their site and traffic all over again once the decision has been made to move to a paid hosting service. Additionally most lack the advanced functions that an ecommerce site usually requires.
The most basic hosting choice is usually the shared server plan. One site will share a web server with many other sites. They will have their own control panel and they can have their own domain names. Often extras to make commerce easier are included such as shopping carts, file transfer via FTP, and email servers.
While not exactly a negative point, the fact is that most successful websites will grow in traffic and eventually begin to take more than their share of server resources. At that point, the business should usually begin to look for a larger type of plan one which has fewer users and more bandwidth. If the site owner wants to remain with the current host many of them will over the next step and even help to move their site over.
The virtual private server is a server that has been divided into much larger sections with each user having their own control panels their own databases and their own operating system. This environment allows for more storage space and is a lot more configurable than a regular shared server. Unlike the shared server basic, the site owner can configure almost every aspect of their virtual server.
Although the virtual dedicated server gives the site owner a greater share of server resources and a large amount of freedom, it is still shared with others. This means if one site draws more than their share of server resources then it can cause the others to slow down as well. These hosting choices are most often used for intermediate level sites and there is still the danger of outgrowing it quickly.
One of the most configurable and spacious web hosting choices is the full dedicated server. This is a machine is dedicated to one person, though there may be many sites owned by the person hosted there. The owner can draw as much as the server resources as they like without affecting others. This is a great alternative for a rapidly growing online business. The least expensive dedicated servers will be unmanaged server, which means that the site owner must take care of many of the routine server functions. The best of the dedicated server choices is almost surely the managed type. With a managed dedicated server the site owner focuses on building their business and the routine tasks are taken care of by the hosting company.
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