by Matt Hedges
Web hosting has become a much sought after activity in terms of online business, especially after the rapid advancement of Internet services. You have the space to ‘host’ your personal homepage, or business profile and webpage through a web hosting company. As even your prospective employers might want to look at your personal thoughts or other details from your own web page, using a web hosting company can thus prove very profitable to you. By creating great networks through your business website, you can successfully expand and consolidate your business over the Internet. One must understand the importance of web hosting for all of this to work.
There are a lot of types of web hosting services like free and paid hosting, shared and clustered web hosting, file and dedicated web hosting, etc. So when you select a web host, you have to consider your needs for it.
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.
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.
There are primarily two ways of web hosting: the IP address based way and the name based way. The host who with own individual IP address provides each of the sites he hosts with their own SSL certificate in the IP address based way. Consequently, a sense of security is endowed to the websites. Various web hosts are provided with a single address in the name based hosting. Everyone uses this particular IP address.
Using a shared host might come cheap, but it comes without the sense of security that is there in IP based hosting.
The name-based web hosting system has other drawbacks as well. They are not fully compatible with old browsers. So an HTTP/1.0 browser will be unable to send requests which carry the name of the host, unless they are upgraded. Due to the fact that they share a common digital certificate, they even cannot support HTTPS websites. It becomes impossible to access them if the Domain Name System chokes out a website which a name-based web server hosts.
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.
Because you are granted this much greater freedom as compared to a shared host, you can do various things from running a totally different OS to having your own scripts and software of choice, without affecting 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.
Due to the internal divisions of the system of the VPS, there is more security to a website than what a shared host provides. In a shared host, if someone hacked into the main server, then every site would get affected, which is not so in case of VPS.
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.
Security is no longer an issue with dedicated server at the helm of all affairs, since you would be the sole user of a server. Even downtime problems are eliminated because of this unique access to the server. Those companies which need to have a database of clients and such other information on their website feel more secure on a dedicated server.
While shared web hosts come cheaper, they also come with the heavy burdens of ominous security concerns and accessibility concerns if other sites face heavy traffic at any point. Using a dedicated server might cost a lot more, but provides you with the comfort and knowledge that you are using a thousand time safer server and one that shouldn’t be slowed down by traffic of other websites. A dedicated server, therefore, is perfect for those looking to expand and grow in their businesses.