Four Different Kinds Of Hosting For Your Blog
What was your first encounter like with website hosting? If you are like me it was something you knew you needed to get your internet site active, but not much more. I was completely ignorant – all I knew was that I wanted something inexpensive. I didn’t know the differences between shared hosting or dedicated servers or the difference between Windows hosting and Linux.
Like many
I began simply with a private website and over time I’ve worked with a small handful of different kinds of hosting services. There's been much trial and error for sure. Some website hosting firms were just plain bad, others were better, but I've been with my company now for a couple of years and I am getting precisely what I want and want. I have had just about every kind of hosting – shared, cloud, dedicated, and VPS.
What’s Website Hosting?
Hosting is something every blogger and website owner has to confront and it could be a bit daunting if you’re not conversant with what kinds of services are available. Just as importantly it could also be confusing if you don’t truly know exactly what you need.
The excitement of getting your new website up can quickly be overcome with confusion as you look at all of the options but a solid website host is essential to the success of your website and you want to choose a good one.
When I got started with my website I didn’t know much, but I could tell when my website performance was bad. As I learned more and more I came to grasp just what I needed and figured out a way to get exactly what I needed with the performance I wanted all at an acceptable price.
So what are all these different hosting options? What are the advantages of one sort of hosting over another? This post covers the different types of web-hosting service what’s best about each one and where you may run in to issues.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is the most elementary and least expensive of site hosting options and it’s often the type of service you hear about when folks are asking others about hosting. A shared hosting plan means there are numerous sites hosted together on a single server. This also means that your website can be on the same server with up to several hundred other sites. Shared hosting accounts have a prescribed quantity of drive space and bandwidth but all sites on the server are pulling from the same pool of server resources and frequently this can cause performance issues for sites that have higher traffic.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is more recent development in the world of web hosting. Cloud hosting gives you lots of the performance perks of virtual private server (more on that below) and dedicated server-type performance but it's much more reasonable when it comes to price. The most significant benefit to cloud hosting is its scalability. Your website is hosted on a network of connected server computers and your website has its own cluster on that network.
Performance is stellar due to your site’s access to multiple networked servers so conquering performance issues that are widespread in shared hosting environments. Traffic issues on one site will not adversely impact your site as the system simply scales to meet the increased demands. While you do not have the fine-grained control over your hosting environment as you would with virtual private server and dedicated hosting, you do have great flexibility and major performance available to you.
Virtual Private Server
For sites that require more control VPS hosting could be a good choice. VPS hosting means you have your own virtual private server which has just one site on it – yours. All the disk space, RAM, and bandwidth are solely devoted your website and yours alone.
Virtual private servers are virtualized servers which is essentially one powerful server computer that’s partitioned in to multiple different virtual machines that are configured to perform as a stand-alone machine and run one website. You get lots of control with a VPS plan so understanding what you are doing with a server is critical if your plan isn’t a professionally managed plan.
Dedicated Server
Dedicated Servers are the top of the line. Some sites have one, some have thousands (think Amazon, Facebook for example). A dedicated server is precisely what it sounds like – an entire server devoted to running your website.
As with the VPS server all of the computer’s resources are dedicated to powering your website. Dedicated servers are commonly used by big companies and smaller firms that need a large amount of horse-power and fine-grained control of their hosting environment. They're as secure as their owners choose to make them to be and often use hardware – not software – firewalls and other security hardware to keep their servers secure. Dedicated servers are the ultimate in control and power and are often expertly controlled by groups of server admin geeks who’s life aspiration is to maximize server performance. It doesn’t get much better than this but you are going to pay for it.
It’s possible to get truly high quality hosting at a reasonable cost, you just need to know what you’re looking at and what you need. Ultimately, things are going to come down to what you want as far as the technology is concerned and how well the service is supported by the host provider THEN you can stress about the price.
Rob Orr is a professional website designer that helps folk create websites that absolutely rock. He does small business website hosting for bloggers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, ecommerce merchants and more at Orracle Hosting and does a podcast for internet site owners on all things web.