Types of web hosting
The web hosting industry is a large business, with thousands and thousands of new web sites being created every year. There are lots of web hosting companies which provide services to a wide range of customers – from individuals who need to set up their own personal sites to businesses which want to make fully featured internet sites. Getting the right kind of web hosting for your needs is essential, and the kinds of web hosting packages that you can purchase can be roughly divided into three types: shared hosting, virtual private server hosting, and dedicated server hosting. Each of these types of web hosting packages is directed at a different kind of user – let’s take a look at what each kind of web hosting entails and who it is directed at.
Shared web hosting is the least expensive of all of the kinds of hosting. While some shared hosting packages may cost between ten and thirty dollars a month, others may cost as little as five dollars a month! Shared web hosting is a type of web hosting where the files for your web site are stored on the same server (that is to say, the same physical computer system) as the files for the web sites of a lot of other users. This is a perfectly fine system for people who do not have any particular security concerns for the contents of their site – i.e. most personal sites are created using shared hosting in order to take advantage of the low prices, and shared hosting accounts are generally provided with a wide range of standard system software such as forum software, site design software and basic FTP server and database software to make it easy for beginning users to work.
Virtual private server hosting is somewhat more expensive – it gives you the ability to run your server as if it were a physically independent system, while at the same time giving you the cost benefit that comes with a shared web hosting server. With a virtual private server system you can “reboot” your server and restart the programs on it – while in reality you are rebooting the virtual system which exists on a physical system that runs lots of other virtual servers. This also gives you a somewhat higher level of personal security than the simple shared server hosting option, although not that much more.
To have the most secure web site with the best reliability, dedicated web hosting is the answer. With a dedicated server, you have a physical unit in the web hosting center which is dedicated to holding only the files for your account. Dedicated servers stay up more often and provide their users with much closer to a 24/7 uptime – generally the percentage of the time that a company’s servers are guaranteed to be up is displayed on the web hosting company’s web site. If you have a business that needs a secure place to store its data online then a dedicated private server for at least a hundred dollars a month is the best web hosting plan for you!