Four Types of Hosting for Your Blog
What was your first encounter like with website hosting? If you’re like me it was something that you knew you needed to have to get your site active, but not a lot more. I was completely ignorant – all I knew was that I wanted something inexpensive. I didn’t know the differences between shared hosting or dedicated servers or the difference between Windows hosting and Linux.
Like many [*COMMA]
I began simply with a personal website and over time I’ve worked with a small handful of different types of hosting services. There's been much trial and error for sure. Some website hosting firms were just plain bad, others were better, but I've been with my company now for a few years and I am getting precisely what I need and want. I have had all sorts of hosting – shared, cloud, dedicated, and VPS.
What’s Website Hosting?
Hosting is something each blogger and website owner has to confront and it could be a little alarming if you aren’t conversant with what varieties of services are available. Just as importantly it may also be confusing if you do not really know exactly what you need.
The excitement of getting your new website up can quickly be overcome with confusion as you look at all the options but a solid web host is essential to the success of your website and you want to choose a very good one.
When I got started with my website I didn’t know much, but I could tell when my website performance was bad. As I learned more and more I came to understand just what I needed and figured out a way to get exactly what I needed with the performance I wanted all at a reasonable price.
So what are all of these different hosting options? What are the advantages of one sort of hosting over another? This post covers the different types of hosting service, what’s best about each one and where you may run in to issues.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is the most elementary and least expensive of site hosting options and it’s customarily the type of service you hear about when people are asking others about hosting. A shared hosting plan means there are numerous sites hosted together on a single server. This also means that your website can be on the same server with up to a few hundred other sites. Shared hosting accounts have a prescribed quantity of drive space and bandwidth but all sites on the server are pulling from the same pool of server resources and regularly this could cause performance issues for sites that have higher traffic.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is more recent development in the world of website hosting. Cloud hosting gives you lots of the performance perks of VPS (more on that below) and dedicated server-type performance but it is much more reasonable when it comes to cost. The most vital benefit to cloud hosting is its scalability. Your website is hosted on a web of connected servers and your website has its own cluster on that network.
Performance is stellar due to your site’s access to multiple networked servers so conquering performance issues that are a regular occurance in shared hosting environments. Traffic issues on one site will not adversely impact your site as the system simply scales to meet the increased demands. While you do not have the fine-grained control of your hosting environment as you would with VPS and dedicated hosting, you do have great flexibility and major performance available to you.
Virtual Private Server
For sites that need more control VPS hosting can be a good choice. VPS hosting means you’ve got your own virtual private server which has just one site on it – yours. All the disk drive space, RAM, and bandwidth are solely devoted your website and yours alone.
VPS servers are virtualized servers which is basically one powerful server computer that’s partitioned in to multiple completely different virtual machines that are set up to perform as a stand-alone machine and run one website. You get complete of control with a VPS plan so understanding what you are doing with a server is critical if your plan is not a professionally managed plan.
Dedicated Server
Dedicated Servers are the top of the line. Some sites have one, some have thousands (think Amazon, Facebook as an example). A dedicated server is precisely what it sounds like – an entire server dedicated to running your website.
As with the VPS server all of the computer’s resources are devoted to powering your website. Dedicated servers are sometimes employed by big companies and smaller firms that need a large amount of horse-power and fine-grained control over their hosting environment. They're as secure as their owners choose to make them to be and frequently use hardware – not software – firewalls and other security hardware to keep their servers secure. Dedicated servers are the final word in control and power and are often expertly controlled by groups of server admin geeks who’s life aspiration is to maximize server performance. It doesn’t get much better than this but you are going to pay for it.
It is of course possible to get truly high quality hosting at a fair cost, you just need to know what you’re looking at and what you need. Ultimately, things are going to come down to what you want as far as the technology is concerned and how well the service is supported by the hosting provider THEN you can stress about the price.
Rob Orr is a professional website designer that helps folk create websites that absolutely rock. He does small business web hosting for blog writers, smaller enterprises, entrepreneurs, ecommerce merchants and more at Orracle Hosting and does a podcast for website owners on all things web.
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