Guide To Types Of Web Hosting

Introduction

If you want to create a website and you know that you need web hosting. If you search around you will see that companies are selling shared hosting, workplace hosting, cloud hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), server clusters, dedicated servers... Some of these are managed, some of these are unmanaged, and the prices differ greatly. It can be complicated so I will explain web hosting differences in a clear way so you can make a good decision when you choose your web hosting services. The very first thing that I feel is very important and I want to mention first is that, if you're looking for web hosting don't limit yourself to the same company. Always look for companies that specialize in different technologies. For example if you're needs require shared hosting then look for companies that specialize in shared hosting. If you're looking for a VPS you need companies that specialize in VPS. 

Shared Hosting

Imagine one tall building... let's call it ACME Shared Hosting Condo's. It has 300 rooms inside of it. Every room has a person living in it with their own personal goals but all rooms share the same electricity bill the same lift and the same water supply. The benefit is that you can live in the nice big building that has everything taking care for you you just pay rent but essentially you're splitting the bill with 300 other people and all of you get an affordable place to live. This is exactly how shared web hosting works. You get a smaller piece of a bigger server and every user on that server shares resources. You can get good shared web hosting plans from one dollar to around four dollars a month. If you expect no more than 20 to 30 people per hour on your website you should be fine. Much of the performance of the server is determined by its operating system, with the best performance being on OpenBSD. Vultr is our choice for everything that is possible in the cloud. Vultr.com even has a free tier incase you just want to dabble a bit or get your feet wet in the cloud vapors while testing out your setup. There are some downsides however, for example every single user on the server is sharing the exact same IP address so if you're sending emails every single user is sending emails from the same address....let's say just 5 of the 300 people start spamming... that means everyone's gonna suffer and everyone's emails goes to spam even if you didn't do anything because as far as google is concerned you're all guilty. There's another big downside if you want to scale your website resources for a limited time shared web hosting isn't really scalable, so it could cost you three or four times the regular cost if you want to scale it up. If I go back to the housing analogy, imagine you want to get two rooms because your friend is visiting for the weekend but the landlord says well there's a one room per person limit if you want to get two rooms you need to move to another building where everyone gets two rooms. You try to explain that you only need the extra space for two days, but he won't listen. I recommend shared web hosting to people that just need a simple website to be on the internet. If you are not planning to build a store, and you're not sending out emails, or you're not building a community...you just need for something to be online where people can come visit take a look and then leave. You can think of it exactly like your room you can have 100 people visit you in one day if they come and go but most likely if all 100 try to fit in at once, you'll have some issues. Or if you try running an actual store from your room there would be lines all across your hallway everyone will be bumping into each other everyone's knocking over your products stuff is breaking all around..it's chaos! 

VPS Hosting

If shared hosting is one building with 300 rooms in it VPS hosting would be a piece of land...let's call it vps land. Divided into 300 pieces, you're still sharing the piece of land with other people but you have much more control over what's going on on it. Because you're only getting a piece of land you can build your website as small or as big as you want while you couldn't build a shopping mall inside your room you can definitely build one using a virtual private server. The way a virtual private server works is instead of getting a preset amount of resources that you can't really change, you get to choose how many resources you want and you can even change that number while your website is already running! Going back to the housing analogy with a VPS one person could be taking up 50 pieces of land for a shopping mall. Another one could have 10 pieces of land for a museum and another one could have four pieces of land for a house. Everyone doesn't have to be equal here like with shared hosting. At this point I hope everything is a little bit more clear and you're starting to understand  the topic of web hosting more. Now I want to touch on another very important subject... the vps is actually split into two categories, managed vps, where you get a lot of help setting everything up, and unmanaged vps, where you basically have to do everything yourself. Back to our housing analogy... imagine you bought one piece of VPS land and you want to build your house. If you get managed VPS then the VPS land owner would give you contacts of the construction company he would also make sure that the internet, heat, electricity and water is taken care of. Once your house is built and he would even give you various tools and contacts if needed or even help you out himself. If your house requires that if you buy unmanaged VPS you would get anything but the piece of land. You would need to do everything yourself and buy your own tools build your house do the plumbing install all of the essentials.. basically you bought the land, you do what you want with it, but you won't get any help. That's why I always recommend buying managed vps even if you are tech savvy because yeah sure it's a little bit more expensive, but not by that much to be honest, and it's gonna save you a lot of time. In my opinion managed vps is actually the best way to host your website and it can be as cheap as 10 dollars per month.

Cloud Hosting

Finally we have cloud hosting which is actually really similar to VPS... to a point where people even confuse the two. There's one major difference: while a virtual private server takes resources from just one server, cloud VPS actually pulls resources from multiple servers. A good way to explain this would be if you're using a virtual private server and one component in that server breaks everything goes offline because it's taking resources from just one server but cloud hosting is actually pulling resources from different computers, so if one component breaks it just replaces that with a component from another computer. It's much more reliable. Imagine if you have one home but electricity to your home is provided from 10 different available sources. When one fails it just switches to another one and this way you always have electricity. 

This article was originally published at Micro Rodeo and is being used with the author's permission.

Web Hosting Explained

You've probably seen terms like shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting, cloud compute, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways. Nearly every web host offers shared hosting which will be your cheapest option. With shared hosting, your website shares a  server, as well as server resources with many other sites. If you don't expect much traffic and want to keep your web hosting budget small, shared hosting is the way to go. You should expect to pay less than ten dollars a month, though keep in mind shared hosting is best suited for small sites that don't need a huge amount of bandwidth. Since you're sharing resources with other websites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown. Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites should pick up VPS or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly powerful server specs. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server's resources, which are also a bit more segregated. VPS hosting also costs more than shared hosting but you should be paying less than a hundred dollars per month. 

Dedicated hosting places your site on a server all by itself, so it can leverage a server's full power. This most expensive type of hosting may cost you a hundred dollars or more per month for the raw power you get. Reseller hosting lets you start your own branded web hosting business without worrying about building the infrastructure from scratch. WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment that caters to the   world's most popular content management system. Cloud hosting lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web host offers it. The pricing for these hosting tiers are all over the place, so shopping around is vital. "Bandwidth" and "data transfer" are frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to visitors, but the terms technically don't have the same definitions. Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time-typically a month. If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data transfers, a web host may slow your site's data transfer speeds or charge you a penalty fee. It may even prompt you to upgrade to a higher web hosting tier. It's good to know your site's data limitations before you run into situations like this. 

Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans by tempting you with the promise of unlimited storage or data transfers. In most cases, it's not a completely honest deal as it almost always has limitations that vary by company. Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated with shared or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild, within limits. If your blog gets a steady stream of reasonable traffic, you'll be in good standing. However, you shouldn't expect to stream or upload 50TB of data per day. You should consult a web host's terms of service or a customer service representative to learn exactly what you can and can't do within the scope of your plan's unlimited offering. For example, DreamHost states that it doesn't track "bandwidth or traffic, so you never have to worry about "those pesky overage fees." If you're looking to sign up for shared web hosting, you'll likely receive real estate on a traditional hard disk drive server. The advantage of an HDD-based server is the large storage amounts offered on the cheap. As you move up the hosting ladder, web hosts will give you the option to build a site on a solid-state drive. SSD-based servers are lightning-fast storage units, but they're quite pricey. So your SSD-based servers typically carry much smaller storage totals than HDDs. You'll rarely see 1TB SSD servers, which is a number that's commonplace in the HDD arena. 

Nearly every web host offers Linux as an operating system option to power their servers. Even if you aren't familiar with Linux, you don't need to do any special work on the back end to build a website. That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting frameworks, you'll need to run with the Windows Server operating system. That's because the script you write and webpage you produce will only function in a Windows-based environment. Microsoft apps such as Office or Outlook easily integrate with the server.