With the rapid advancement of internet services web hosting has become a much sought after activity as far as online businesses are concerned. A web hosting company provides you the space to ‘host’ either your personal homepage or your business profile and webpage. Using a web hosting company can prove very beneficial to you, as even your prospective employers might want to take a look at your personal thoughts and other details from your very own web page. Businesses too can be successfully expanded and consolidated over the internet by building great networks through your business website. For all of this to work, one must understand the importance of web hosting.

There are several types of web hosting like shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, free hosting, paid hosting and clustered hosting. While choosing a web host for yourself, choose among these available ones but according to your needs and demands.

Following are the three common kinds of web hosting:

Shared hosting

Simply put, a solitary server hosting and supporting several web pages is called shared hosting. Newly started businesses which are unable to spend larges sums of money to acquire dedicated servers suit this type perfectly. As a result, other expenses like maintaining a system administrator are done away with.

The shared web hosting provider, much like dedicated hosting, provides the customers a lot of features like management of server, backup of files, security updates, etc.

Web hosting is primarily done in two ways: the IP address based way and the name based way. In the IP address way, the host who has his own individual IP address provides each of the sites he hosts with their own SSL certificate, thereby endowing a sense of security to the websites. While for name based hosting, the various web sites hosted are provided with a single IP address which is to be used by all.

The sense of security that comes with the IP based hosting may not come with a shared host. On the other hand, the shared host might come cheaper than the IP based hosting.

There are also several other disadvantages of the name based hosting system like its incompatibility with relatively old browsers. A HTTP/1.0 browser without up gradation will fail to send out requests carrying the host name. Also because they share same digital certificates, Hand name based hosts cannot support HTPPS websites either. And if the Domain Name System or the DNS conks out any website hosted by a name based web host becomes virtually impossible to access.

So keeping aside the cost benefits of a shared web hosting system, its lack of features like lower disk space and bandwidth, slow speed of the site due to many others using the same server, etc., clearly outweighs the cost benefit. A webmaster can have little control over things like the system software and the scripts. However, the silver lining is that if you don’t use the website for extensive business purpose, and if you can adjust with the flaws of a shared web host, there is nothing better than that. However, you must be acquainted with Virtual Private Server [VPS] if you wish to have greater control over your website.

VPS – Virtual Private Server

Much like a shared server, even a VPS has a single server, but it uses software which divided it into many virtual machines. So though many websites still use the same server, each VPS gets its own RAM allotment, besides bandwidth and disk space, and they can operate independently by using the resources allocated to them.

Due to the fact that webmasters are allowed more freedom than a shared host, they can perform various operations by running a different operating system and having their unique script and software, which wouldn’t affect other websites using the same server.

The liberties associated with dedicated servers are nearly identical to the root level access to the main server that you get in a VPS. At a comparatively lesser price than a dedicated server, you can install your preferred software; create accounts etc in a VPS.

The sense of security of a VPS system is much greater than a shared hosting service because of the internal division of the former. All sites are at risk a shared hosting service if the main server is hacked into. On the other hand, this is not the case in a VPS system.

As far as the division of the server is concerned, it usually occurs evenly with the total equal distribution of resources among the number of websites that are sharing the server. So, if there are 10 websites on a VPS server, everything starting from the disk space to the RAM is divided into 10 parts, with each website getting 10% of the whole.

Dedicated hosting

As mentioned earlier, dedicated hosting is meant for huge concerns who wish to have sufficient control of the website in their hands. In this case, a website gets a single server for its individual capacity, thus giving webmasters total control of the website. Besides the software, all other factors like supervision of power, security, etc. is addresses by the web hosting company.

Dedicated web hosting is the best choice is you need high amount of bandwidth, more disk space and a customized server. Besides, you get to choose the features for the website as well, like the software, settings, operating system and multimedia requirements. It’s a good option to consider if you can’t manage a private server due to limited expenses.

A dedicated server can also bail you out and save expenses up to 85%, if your website has a high traffic count but you do not have the monitory resources and technical know how to maintain, install and run your own IT staff, programs that will run everything smoothly and most of all if you can’t pay for a network administrator.

As you know that you are the only one using this server, a dedicated server thus offers 100% assurance and security to you. Downtime problems and security issues are also solved if there are no other sites on the server. Companies feel safer using a managed dedicated host providing additional data security. This is especially true for companies that have client databases and other important information up on their sites.

So while the costs of a shared host are less, they are never very secure and never so easily accessible as dedicated web hosts are. Using the latter might require you to shell out some extra expenses, but given that it gives you a very higher level of safety than a shared server makes the additional expenses worth incurring. For purposes of business growth, a dedicated server is a must!

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