Hosting a website is one area of launching an online presence that many still find baffling. Content management systems such as WordPress have made the design element fun and simple even for the layman, but web hosting can often leave those out of the loop scratching their heads.
With this in mind we decided to explore the three main types of hosting that are available here in this article. Choosing the right package for your site depends on a few factors, so let’s jump straight in and look at the different options you have when selecting hosting for your site:
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is your low level, basic type of hosting package. Generally used by small bloggers and those with personal sites, shared hosting is far and away the cheapest option available. Cheapness, however, comes at a price.
If you are looking to start up an online business, shared hosting may prove not to be the best way to go. As the name suggests, you will be sharing a web server with many other websites and it is this fact that allows web-hosting companies to offer such low prices.
This community aspect can work against you if you expect to receive a decent flow of traffic through your site. Heavy traffic can affect site speed and, in some instances, even bring the site down altogether. If you are running a business that relies on your visitors to generate income, neither of these things are going to be good for your bottom line.
Dedicated hosting
This is pretty much the exact opposite of shared hosting. Dedicated packages give your website its very own web server to do with as you please. These can be held on-premises or stored at the hosting companies data centre, whichever fits your needs best.
Dedicated hosting is far from cheap, though, and it will demand a far bit of technical knowledge in order to keep things up to date and working correctly. For this reason, dedicated packages are generally only taken on by bigger businesses that have their own IT team and a budget that can handle the ongoing expense of having a dedicated server all to themselves.
VPS hosting
If all sound a little bleak so far, fear not, there is a third way! VPS, or Virtual Private Servers, are a hybrid of the two hosting options that we have already mentioned. VPS works by offering dedicated space on one server to a number of users, thus giving your website more leeway when it comes to the amount of traffic that it can handle.
VPS also generally comes with support thrown in too, so there is no need to worry about the technicalities of hosting either. This makes Linux VPS hosting from Host1Plus a very attractive proposition to small to medium sized businesses that want the room to grow, without the headache of managing the server themselves.
So, there you have it, the three main ways that you and your business can get an active website up and online. Depending on whether you intend to run a website for profit or fun will be a huge factor as to which way you decide to go with your hosting. As with most things in life, getting it right from the start can save a lot of problems later on, so choose wisely. It could mean the difference between success and failure.
