You may be a blogger, web developer, entrepreneur or small business owner. While taking the business online, one important question we all face and that is what kind of web hosting I should opt for. In response to this, there are many technical terms thrown at us. Shared hosting, unlimited hosting, dedicated hosting and so on. We have hard time understanding them and most importantly, zeroing down on our choice. Let us try to demystify some of these types of web hosting in this blog post.
Types of web hosting
There are many types of web hosting available. The difference in features and facilities provided create these types. Based on the type of audience, the expected traffic, expected size of data, and many such factors decide the best fit hosting for you. Now, we will try to understand these types one by one.
Types of web hosting: Shared hosting
As the name suggested, in shared hosting, your website co-exists with many other websites. The same server resources like hardware, disk space, bandwidth etc. are shared among many clients. This is good choice for first-timers or starters in the web hosting.
This type is simple and cost effective. Start with this type of hosting and then as you get more experience with customers and user traffic, switch to more appropriate complex type.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated web hosting is hundred percent opposite option of shared hosting. In dedicated hosting, the server is completely dedicated for you. No one shares any resources like disk space, memory, bandwidth etc. You have complete control over the server.
But, the dedicated web hosting does not come cheap. A dedicated server needs a good amount of investment from your side. This option is rather the most expensive one.
Dedicated web hosting option is most suitable for very high traffic website. Do I have any in between choice? Yes. Please read further.
Types of web hosting: VPS
There is one more type called VPS or virtual private server which falls between dedicated and shared hosting. In this case, few customers share one server. However, the number of customers sharing a server is not very large. Hence everyone gets enough resources for expansion.
When you are new, the first choice can be the shared hosting. You host the website. Next step is to attract customers to your website. So, you start looking at digital marketing avenues for reaching customers. You try out social media, Google adwords, Search engine optimization (SEO) and what not. With these efforts, visitors to your website would start increasing.
The user traffic would start slowly increasing as more and more customers come to know about your website. When customers find value in what you are offering, they start repeatedly visiting your website. This increases the traffic further.
When you start experiencing increase in traffic, you may switch to a better option than shared hosting. VPS hosting would be a choice in that case.
