When you are planning to start a website, for your business or for some personal creative needs, or for whatever other reason, apart from the creation of the website itself, you’ve got to decide how you are going to host it. There are various hosting solutions that suit better to different purposes, and this may be confusing for a beginner in this area. For this reason, we’ve prepared this short guide where we will let you have a look at the most common hosting solutions and understand, which of them is better for your particular purpose.
What is web hosting?
When a website is created, it needs to run to be accessible to other users all the time, so the site needs a host. You are not going to host a site with your PC, as you are not going to leave it on 24/7 – it will not survive it for a long time. Therefore, to host your website, you need special hardware – a server, a computer aimed especially at hosting websites, which are usually stored at data centers and rented by different hosting provider companies.
The server itself can be used in different ways, thus offering different levels of performance, control, and security. Now, let’s look at the different types of web hosting according to how servers are used.
Types of web hosting
Shared hosting
This solution is often preferred by entry-level users, that’s why we’ve decided to start from it. Shared hosting is the type of hosting that is based upon a rather straightforward approach: one so-called paternal server is shared among the users of a single shared hosting. Yet there are no restrictions to the way the customers use it, for this reason sometimes they may compete for the capacities of the physical machine, which can sometimes cause the reduced performance of the websites hosted.
Also, this hosting solution is not the best one in terms of security, since the environment is shared, so the clients are more vulnerable
This makes shared hosting a good solution for people who are going to start a website that is not so demanding in terms of performance and who don’t have a very high budget to spend.
VPS Hosting
This hosting is in some way similar to the previous one as it uses a shared physical machine, but it is, let’s say, an upgraded version of it. This type of hosting allows the client to avoid most troubles that are caused by the neighbors by means of virtualization technology. This technology allows for creating virtual machines upon the parental physical machine that is shared. These virtual machines act independently from each other, having dedicated resources, different IP addresses, and their own operating systems. All this enables smooth and reliable operation with a significantly higher level of security than with shared hosting.
With VPS hosting you pay for the concrete amount of resources you need and you can scale it up or down whenever you realize that the needs of your website have changed.
With your own operating system, you have pretty much freedom in managing your server, and you can also decide, whether you want to manage the server on your own (renting an unmanaged VPS) or whether you want someone else to do it for you for additional payment with the option “managed VPS” – in case you don’t feel confident enough with your technical expertise or you just wish to dedicate more time and attention to the development of your business itself.
Also, VPS rental still comes at rather affordable prices, which are generally higher than the ones of shared hosting, but here you know what you pay for.
This makes VPS a good choice for a great number of clients who are going to host a medium-scale website, and who look for decent reliability, security, and performance.
Dedicated server
This type of server is the ultimate configuration of the server because it is a whole server with all its capacities that are fully dedicated to you. Pretty much naturally, this one provides the highest level of performance, security, and reliability, and all this comes for the highest price.
It’s less probable that you will need it once you start your business, but your business will grow, and eventually, you’ll need something of this kind that will be able to cope with massive traffic, large amounts of data, sophisticated designs, and powerful apps.
Thus, a dedicated server is not a solution for everyone, but if you realize that you need to get maximum capacities at the disposal of your website, then this is the best option you can opt for.
Conclusion
In today’s article, we’ve had a look at the most common types of web hosting. Of course, this subject is quite extensive, so you can’t cover every aspect of hosting in an article of this size. But in our opinion, knowing which are the possible options for hosting your website is the best point to start. If you want to learn more about it or purchase a hosting solution, then we highly recommend you to have a look at Hostzealot’s website. Take care!
Learn more
https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/web-hosting/how-to-host-a-website/
https://blog.hubspot.com/website/web-hosting
