Webhosting: Shared, VPS or Dedicated

Due to the rapid speed of success achieved by web hosting companies, web hosting services have become a trend in online business. A web hosting company hosts your website, whether personal or professional. It can also provide you with a host of benefits, and to add to it, your to-be employers might also appreciate seeing your details from your own website, rather than from any other place. Internet has emerged as a great medium for conducting business, and a website is a prerequisite for this purpose, which facilitates the need of a web hosting company. To make such things work, a webmaster must be aware of how important web hosting is.

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.

Some common types of web hosting are mentioned below:

Shared hosting

A shared host is a server which supports many web pages. A shared host is generally the best for a business where the expenses does not permit them to go for the dedicated web hosting services, and a shared hosting helps them save a lot of unnecessary expenses as well.

Various maintenance features are provided by the service provider of the shared hosting. These include security updates, server management, anti-virus backup and server software.

Web hosting can be conducted in two basic ways: based on the IP address and based on the name. In the former case, the host having his unique IP address provides every website that he hosts with their individual SSL certificates, which gives the website owners a lot of security. In case of the latter way, a lot of websites which the provider hosts are assigned just one IP address, which everyone uses.

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.

The incompatibility with relatively old browsers is one of the many disadvantages of the name based hosting system. A failure to send out requests carrying the host name will occur with a HTTP/1.0 browser without up gradation. Hand name based hosts cannot support HTPPS websites because they share the same digital certificates. It is virtually impossible to access if the Domain Name System (DNS) conks out any website hosted by a name based web host.

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.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

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.

You can do various things as you are granted this much greater freedom when compared to a shared host. These different things range from running a totally different OS to having your own scripts and choice of software, without disturbing the other sites on the server.

The kind of access that you may get to the main server in case of VPS is almost similar to the kind of access that you could get in a dedicated server. The only difference is that installing software and scripts can be done at a much lower cost in the case of 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.

The division of the server generally occurs evenly with the total resources being distributed equally among the number of websites that are sharing the server. Therefore if there are 10 websites on a VPS server, everything from the disk space to the RAM is divided by 10, 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.

Your expenses can be saved up to 85% with a dedicated server. You may not have the financial resources and technical know-how to maintain, install and run your own IT staff but have a high traffic to your website. Then, if you can not pay for a network administrator, the programs will run everything smoothly and most of the other functions.

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.

Though shared web hosts arrive with the heavy burdens of threatening security and accessibility concerns if other sites face heavy traffic at any point, they are nevertheless cheaper. You will have the comfort and knowledge that you are using a thousand time safer server and which cannot be slowed down by traffic of other websites with a slightly costlier dedicated server. Those looking for forward to expand and grow their business will consequently find a dedicated server perfectly suited to their needs.