Common Choices in Website Hosting

If you’re in the market for website hosting for the first time, you’re bound to come across quite a few choices that add up to huge differences in the price of hosting services.  For someone who isn’t particularly familiar with the jargon of the industry, it can be difficult to answer what might sound like a simple question:

“What kind of website hosting do you need?”

You may be tempted to spend more because you think you’re getting more quality out of the service, but since a lot of plan costs are measured in terms of traffic volume and server processing time, you might end up spending a whole lot of money that you didn’t need to part with.

Free hosting

For website amateurs and startups with zero budget, there are free options available in web hosting.  Blogspot and WordPress blogs can be served from a third party at no cost, but you’re going to run in to the issue of having limited control over your files and even the content you’re allowed to publish.  While Blogspot, Squidoo, and some others are friendly with advertising and commercial activities, this isn’t an option on all free web hosts.  They might want to put their ads on your website or, in the case of free sites hosted with WordPress, they may want you to avoid all commercial uses at all times.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is the entry level of paid hosting services, and for most webmasters the resources provided in these types of plans is adequate for running small business sites and online shops.  Multiple domains can be hosted on a single account, and most providers allow full access to all server files, so control and flexibility is the great benefit of spending an extra few bucks a month over the free alternatives.

VPS hosting

When shared hosting isn’t quite enough, many companies offer a Virtual Private Server (VPS) option.  The VPS is technically a shared hosting environment, but fewer customers share a particular machine and servers are set up to run virtual nodes for each account.  These VPS plans are generally about twice as expensive as shared webhosts, but for individuals dealing with high traffic or complex processing demands should probably spend the extra investment before they run into the limitations of shared hosting environments.

Dedicated Hosting

For large-scale sites or anything that is critical to the operation of highly profitable enterprise, nothing short of dedicated hosting will suffice.  With dedicated or managed hosting plans, an entire server is dedicated to the use of the individual customer and his or her websites.  In addition to the full resources available on high-tech servers, these plans also include top-notch levels of customer support and technical debugging.  While a lot of shared and VPS plans are considered to be of the “do it yourself” variety, dedicated and managed hosting plans come with full tech support and rapid recovery in the case of crashes and outage.

The wrong hosting will set you back

Choosing a webhost is not something that should be undertaken lightly.  Once a decision is made and a website is started, it can be difficult to migrate your data to a new host.

However, new websites are rarely profitable in the short-term, so webmasters shouldn’t put their new business into the red off the bat!  If you’re building your first websites, you’re probably safe with shared hosting for a while.  There’s definitely no need to pay a hundred or more dollars a month for dedicated servers to support your personal blog!

This entry was posted in hosting faq.

One Response to Common Choices in Website Hosting

  1. Phil says:

    Does anyone know how much traffic a shared host can handle for a WordPress blog?

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