The right type of hosting for your business largely depends on how new your online venture is and how popular it’s become. There are certainly companies that rely on shared hosting plans because they only receive a few hundred daily visitors, which doesn’t overrun busy servers. However, there are also larger endeavors that benefit from something with a bit more capacity or extra server features.
Let’s examine the different types of hosting accounts now, so you can see which type is best for your business.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting plans are by far the cheapest plans you can get. Some companies separate out shared plans into multiple tiers with the first offering hosting for one site, the second a handful of sites, and the third with the expectation that multiple sites will be hosted that pull in a fair number of visitors.
The idea of shared hosting is that a single web server manages upwards of 1,000 different websites. This wouldn’t usually be feasible, but the reason it can do it is that none of the sites have many visitors arriving during peak traffic hours. Because no one site consumes too many CPU cycles, the server keeps humming along delivering the requested web pages.
The downside to shared hosting is that it tends to be slow. Unlimited plans usually have ‘fair use’ policies attached, but it’s still possible that a handful of sites can slow the server down for everyone else. There are also fewer features like database access and other niceties, support is more limited, and there’s no control over the server functionality.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is the next level up from a shared server. The idea here is that a single server is split into private virtual servers with each one being allocated one or more processor cores, some memory, and drive space. Servers tend to be faster, better maintained, and have fewer websites hosted on them. Customers can upgrade to get a higher allocation of processor cores (or faster ones), add larger memory allocations, and so forth.
The downsides of a VPS are that you usually pay for every megabyte of bandwidth used; the more visitors, the higher the costs. Scaling up to a fast server that serves pages quicker and handles a higher volume of traffic can get expensive real fast. Compare VPS providers for the best deal at Hosting Kingdom.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is where you get a server all to yourself. There’s no risk of another website hosted on the server crashing it or slowing down your site. Bandwidth is strictly controlled. You’ll have access to the cPanel control panel (or similar alternative) and usually have superuser root access too.
With a dedicated server, the downside is it’s a single server which could fail and cause the entire site to go down. One way around this is newer cloud hosting, which is similar to a VPS hosting solution but with parts of the site hosted on different servers.
Hosting is difficult to understand at first, but it’s really not that complicated. It depends on how new and busy your site is whether you’ll need a shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud hosting package. It’s also possible to change packages when the need arises too.