Building a website has become critical for jump-starting modern marketing, building company reputations and branding products. Even personal social success is defined by establishing a website or starting a blog to reach like-minded friends and followers in the digital age. Websites are collections of files that you can make accessible to other people across boundaries and borders. Web servers store the information and applications that run on your site, and hosting services make maintaining personal and business websites possible.
Different types of hosting services offer structured benefits for various types of websites and businesses, and choosing the best hosting option depends on your particular needs. Small website operators might do fine with a free hosting service, but larger companies might prefer the redundant options available from clustered hosting. Other possibilities include dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers, colocation hosting and cloud hosting services. Choosing the best option for your needs involves understanding the relative benefits and drawbacks of each type of service.
Shared hosting is the most common and affordable type of web hosting. Thanks to the virtual hosting concept, companies regularly use this method to run hundreds to thousands of domains on a single server. All these sites eat from the same RAM, processing juice, and other hardware resources. Since numerous customers are paying for the rent, so to speak, the cost is flat out cheap. You can easily find shared hosting plans for less than two bucks a month.
Shared hosting is like living in an apartment complex, so the traps are similar. When the neighbor upstairs is partying like a rockstar, their thunderous racket pours down on your unit as you try to sleep. When the neighboring business experiences a sudden surge of traffic, your website could run slow because of the extra bandwidth they command. Or worse, the careless tenant who leaves the main door open could put all other tenants at the risk of burglary – or render everyone else on the server vulnerable to a security breach.
Dedicated hosting is like the opposite of shared web hosting. Here you have an entire server at your disposal and all the control that comes with it. You can run your own programming packages (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.), install custom applications, and even lease out server space to your own clients. It’ll cost you a lot more per month, but since you’re not sharing resources, you have all the disk space, processing punch, RAM, and bandwidth to yourself, which still isn’t unlimited, yet more than what you get in a shared hosting arrangement.
The control and flexibility of dedicated hosting comes at the cost of responsibility. Unlike the shared environment, where the hosting firm handles all the backend stuff, you are solely responsible for maintaining the server that houses your website. In most cases, this means you have to manage the operating system as well as the web server, database, control panel, and other software installed on the hardware. When it comes to dedicated hosting, server administration skills are critical to ensuring that your site endures as little downtime as possible and consistently performs superbly for visitors.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is like a mashup of shared and dedicated hosting. Virtualization software is key here as the host uses a hypervisor that allows each individual client to have their own virtual server. It’s like your own little VM running on the web. So not only do you have your own OS, you can manage the system from the root, allocate resources, and perform various tasks that just aren’t possible in a shared hosting solution. From a flexibility standpoint, it’s like having a dedicated server at half the cost well, almost.
The limitations of virtualization are pretty much the cons of VPS hosting. Though you typically have more than what’s available in the unlimited shared hosting plan, you’re limited by the resources of the underlying hardware, which you’re still technically sharing with other clients. So if your IT administrator does a poor job of allocating resources or the host oversells by assuming customers won’t push the server to the limits, your cozy virtual environment could take a hit. If you want a smooth VPS experience, be dilegent in asking hosting firms roughly how many virtual machines they run per server.
Cloud hosting is a viable alternative to each of the aforementioned variations. From RAM to web apps, all the resources crucial to your website are distributed from a mass of servers optimized to handle the load. So there’s no running out of disk space like with shared hosting. No need to be as meticulous about resource allocation as you would be with VPS hosting. No need to upgrade to a big ol’ server you’re not even sure you can handle ala dedicated hosting. Plus you only pay for the resources you use, so scaling up isn’t going to be as expensive as buying a whole new package.
The biggest downside to cloud hosting right now is slow penetration. Many of the industry heavyweights have yet to embrace the forecast with open arms, so cloud hosting solutions are still harder to find by comparison. This will likely change in the near future, but it’ll take some added diligence to make sure you select a vendor that can effectively integrate the cloud into the web hosting environment.
Clustered hosting offers redundant servers to take over when one server goes off-line. This solution can be expensive, but it might be the best choice for high-traffic websites that target global customers. Highly scalable, the option provides high availability for multiple website applications. You can easily shut down one server for maintenance while assigning its load to other servers. Of course, cost are high, and the hosting option increases the infrastructure that needs managing and monitoring. A cluster can be assemble from a bunch of dedicated servers, cloud servers or even an hybrid of both. This is a very robust solution.
Different types of hosting services offer structured benefits for various types of websites and businesses, and choosing the best hosting option depends on your particular needs. Small website operators might do fine with a free hosting service, but larger companies might prefer the redundant options available from clustered hosting. Other possibilities include dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers, colocation hosting and cloud hosting services. Choosing the best option for your needs involves understanding the relative benefits and drawbacks of each type of service.
Shared hosting is the most common and affordable type of web hosting. Thanks to the virtual hosting concept, companies regularly use this method to run hundreds to thousands of domains on a single server. All these sites eat from the same RAM, processing juice, and other hardware resources. Since numerous customers are paying for the rent, so to speak, the cost is flat out cheap. You can easily find shared hosting plans for less than two bucks a month.
Shared hosting is like living in an apartment complex, so the traps are similar. When the neighbor upstairs is partying like a rockstar, their thunderous racket pours down on your unit as you try to sleep. When the neighboring business experiences a sudden surge of traffic, your website could run slow because of the extra bandwidth they command. Or worse, the careless tenant who leaves the main door open could put all other tenants at the risk of burglary – or render everyone else on the server vulnerable to a security breach.
Dedicated hosting is like the opposite of shared web hosting. Here you have an entire server at your disposal and all the control that comes with it. You can run your own programming packages (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.), install custom applications, and even lease out server space to your own clients. It’ll cost you a lot more per month, but since you’re not sharing resources, you have all the disk space, processing punch, RAM, and bandwidth to yourself, which still isn’t unlimited, yet more than what you get in a shared hosting arrangement.
The control and flexibility of dedicated hosting comes at the cost of responsibility. Unlike the shared environment, where the hosting firm handles all the backend stuff, you are solely responsible for maintaining the server that houses your website. In most cases, this means you have to manage the operating system as well as the web server, database, control panel, and other software installed on the hardware. When it comes to dedicated hosting, server administration skills are critical to ensuring that your site endures as little downtime as possible and consistently performs superbly for visitors.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is like a mashup of shared and dedicated hosting. Virtualization software is key here as the host uses a hypervisor that allows each individual client to have their own virtual server. It’s like your own little VM running on the web. So not only do you have your own OS, you can manage the system from the root, allocate resources, and perform various tasks that just aren’t possible in a shared hosting solution. From a flexibility standpoint, it’s like having a dedicated server at half the cost well, almost.
The limitations of virtualization are pretty much the cons of VPS hosting. Though you typically have more than what’s available in the unlimited shared hosting plan, you’re limited by the resources of the underlying hardware, which you’re still technically sharing with other clients. So if your IT administrator does a poor job of allocating resources or the host oversells by assuming customers won’t push the server to the limits, your cozy virtual environment could take a hit. If you want a smooth VPS experience, be dilegent in asking hosting firms roughly how many virtual machines they run per server.
Cloud hosting is a viable alternative to each of the aforementioned variations. From RAM to web apps, all the resources crucial to your website are distributed from a mass of servers optimized to handle the load. So there’s no running out of disk space like with shared hosting. No need to be as meticulous about resource allocation as you would be with VPS hosting. No need to upgrade to a big ol’ server you’re not even sure you can handle ala dedicated hosting. Plus you only pay for the resources you use, so scaling up isn’t going to be as expensive as buying a whole new package.
The biggest downside to cloud hosting right now is slow penetration. Many of the industry heavyweights have yet to embrace the forecast with open arms, so cloud hosting solutions are still harder to find by comparison. This will likely change in the near future, but it’ll take some added diligence to make sure you select a vendor that can effectively integrate the cloud into the web hosting environment.
Clustered hosting offers redundant servers to take over when one server goes off-line. This solution can be expensive, but it might be the best choice for high-traffic websites that target global customers. Highly scalable, the option provides high availability for multiple website applications. You can easily shut down one server for maintenance while assigning its load to other servers. Of course, cost are high, and the hosting option increases the infrastructure that needs managing and monitoring. A cluster can be assemble from a bunch of dedicated servers, cloud servers or even an hybrid of both. This is a very robust solution.