Website Hosting Options
Posted in Hosting, Starting Out by DB
Deciding on what hosting option works best for your website is a complicated exercise if you are a beginner to the world of web hosting. This post hopefully will shed light on the various hosting options that are out there or on offer from various web hosting companies.
Shared Hosting
The basic and most popular category of web hosting is shared hosting. Shared hosting is when you and several other websites share resources such as the web server disk space, RAM and processing. To put it in simple terms, shared web hosting entails hosting number of websites, either belonging to you or other customers on hosting infrastructure that is shared.
Most of the offers that are advertised by web hosting companies or resellers are shared hosting plans. You could be looking at spending around $10 for decent shared hosting plan from a reputable hosting provider.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is pretty much is opposite of shared hosting. Pretty much most of the infrastructure apart from the connectivity is dedicated to one website or one customer. Dedicated hosting affords you flexibility that a shared hosting cannot be it directly from a hosting provider or from a reseller.
As a complete newbie, you are better off starting with shared hosting and moving within the realms of shared hosting as you go along. So basically you start with a shared hosting plan and as you gradually start pushing the limit of the shared resources or if you start to launch more websites, you can then migrate to a reseller plan.
A reseller hosting plan typically gives you more flexibility and control on your websites and resource allocation to your websites. A reseller plan also effectively helps you to segregate different websites and reduces your chances of your entire hosting portfolio getting yanked if you have an issue with one website.
The next step from a reseller hosting plan is to go for a virtual private server or VPS for short. A VPS is for all practical purposes pretty similar to having your own dedicated server but as the name says, it is virtual. You have VPS software that can effectively partition a server’s resources such as disk space, memory and processing speed into separate units. Each unit is then given to a customer who has complete control over that particular unit. While it may seem to be a dedicated server, a VPS is still a shared hosting option.
The final step in the hosting ladder is the dedicated option. You could start with running a single dedicated server and slowly migrate to a rack to even a complete datacenter as your website or business grows.
Cloud computing such as EC2 and S3 from Amazon and Big Table Google have taken the VPS unit concept and applied it at a dedicated server level.
Website Hosting can be incredibly complicated from a newbie. Finding the right hosting company and the right hosting plan for your website requires you to do the right due diligence and a reasonable understanding your website requirements. Good luck in finding that web hosting plan. As a first step I would recommend you look at your web hosting needs. Next would be to specify those needs and choose your hosting option accordingly. After that it is a question of setting up your hosting account, do the necessary configurations and flip the switch to take you live. Ofcourse I am kinda generalizing a little bit here but I’m sure you get the picture.
One last note, do not forget the search engines. I will post an article, hopefully soon on what you should be doing from a hosting perspective to help your website rank better on search engines. Hey, if you are interested in SEO, let me end this post by pointing you to Busby SEO Challenge, a search engine contest that is currently going on. Enjoy!!
