Types of Web Hosting Services

There are various types of web hosting services available to host your website.  Depending on your needs, you could choose from one of several web hosting solutions and therefore it is important to research and evaluate the services to pick the correct one.

There are a variety of web hosting service options which companies and individuals may choose from, in fact the choices are sometimes overwhelming.

1. Shared Hosting
2. Dedicated Server Hosting 
3. Virtual Private Server (VPS) 
4. Cloud Hosting 
5. Reseller Hosting 
6. Colocation Web Hosting 
7. Free Web Hosting

1. SHARED HOSTING :

In a shared hosting environment, One’s website is setup on the same server machine as many other websites. This includes sharing the physical server and the software applications within the server such as HDD, memory or CPU. Shared hosting services are affordable because the cost to operate the server is shared between you and these other owners.

Shared Hosting is affordable but you must be sure that the hosting package you web hosting company is providing you actually supports what you need, scripting languages, applications, control panel etc.

Advantage:

The main being price – they are usually the cheapest and most affordable solutions for an online presence. Since the company hosts tens of websites on one server, they are able to pass the savings to the consumer. Performance could be a downside, but with hardware getting cheaper and software getting better, this aspect might not be relevant for everyone.

Disadvantage:

The biggest disadvantage of a shared hosting account is that you’re at the mercy of the other sites on your server. A really popular site may adversely affect the performance of your own site. On the other hand, if you’re the most popular site on the server, you get to use a super server for a very low price.

2. DEDICATED SERVER :

This is a service where each and every customer is assigned an entire server without having to share it with any other clients. The customer can also host more than one website on this server. The customer here is totally responsible for managing his own webpage. This is a more reliable form of hosting that shared hosting. This allows for faster performance, as you have all the server’s resources entirely, without sharing with other website owners. However, this also means that you will be responsible for the cost of server operation entirely. This is a good choice for websites that requires a lot of system resources, or need a higher level of security.

Advantage:

When you purchase a dedicated hosting package, you have access to the complete server. Dedicated packages are usually tailored to the amount of bandwidth, memory, and hard drive space that you might need and they allow for CPU intensive applications to operate without hindering other sites or being conflicted.

Disadvantage:

The extra functionality and control does come at a higher monetary cost – dedicated hosting solutions are more expensive than the virtual options. But they are providing you with a lot more in terms of resources. Most dedicated hosting packages will involve some sort of a setup fee as it is more time consuming to setup a complete server than it is to create a hosting account in a shared environment.

3. VIRTUAL PRIVATE SERVER (VPS) :

Virtual private servers share one physical server but acts like multiple, separate servers. Basically VPS hosting is like a shared hosting with few main differences. In shared hosting you will share your resources but in VPS, every user share the same server with many users but each user has a small operation system that can be rebooted and managed independently. A VPS is a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine.

In a Virtual Private Server you share system resources like the CPU and RAM with other users but the resources are allocated in such a way that you cannot tell that the system has anyone else on it, much like a dedicated server. So resources are usually setup in such a way that each hosting client is only allowed to use an allocated percent, meaning that resources assigned to you will always available to you. Each virtual server looks and acts like a dedicated server.

Advantages:

VPS hosting is able to bring many advantages including the ability to install any software that you want as well as being able to host your websites in your own space without the worry of being affected by any other users or websites that are hosted on the same server as you; the price of VPS hosting is also attractive to many who are in need of a dedicated server, but are unable to afford one. VPS Hosting also provides better uptime than shared web hosting

Disadvantages:

Though VPS hosting might have numerous advantages, there could be a few flaws. The maintenance problem of a virtual server is the main disadvantage as each of it has its own operating system. Hence maintenance gets tough. Responsibility of security, updates and maintenance lies with the web. Hence it becomes quite difficult. Secondly, certain web hosts fail to provide the actual resource they promised. Since most of the servers do not use its full resources, it becomes difficult to handle such operations at a peak level.

Another main disadvantage of VPS hosting is the fact that in some cases the CPU of the main server is not equally shared between all the hosted VPS, meaning that it is open to compromise from rogue VPS, and if done correctly a rogue VPS could easily bring down the whole node if it ends up using too much of the CPU.

4. CLOUD HOSTING :

Cloud Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology that lets hundreds of individual servers work together so that it looks like one giant server. The idea is that as the need grows, the hosting company can just add more commodity hardware to make an ever larger grid or cloud.

Cloud Hosting is a dedicated, high performance, analytic database cluster that is open to businesses, on a pay-per-use, for a monthly fee. The key feature is that you will never pay for more storage and bandwidth than you need because of the flexibility.

Advantages:

Cloud computing does give a company a lot of flexibility for growth. With cloud computing you can set up servers as you need them to help deal with sudden bursts in your business. A company can quickly expand their cloud infrastructure by adding more servers or adding more networks to meet their new business needs. This is great for start-ups that are not sure what the future holds or where their company will be in a couple of months. If, all of a sudden, business starts to take off for you company, cloud computing can keep up with your company’s growth faster than a dedicated server.

Disadvantages:

As your website start to generate more traffic, the more bandwidth your business starts to eat up and the more space it will require. Your monthly bill can start to grow and with a payment method that is not constant, it can become overwhelming quite quickly. You will also need to depend on third-party to safeguard the security and privacy of data and information

5. RESELLER HOSTING :

Reseller web host services allow the clients to become web hosts. One gets a large amount of space and bandwidth that can be divided up among as many sites as the user wants to put on his account. A reseller account is placed on the same server with other reseller accounts, just like with shared hosting but there are fewer accounts. Most of the resellers are web consultant, web developers and web designers.

Advantages:

The first advantage of reseller hosting is the amount of server resources that are available to you. Even if you decide not to resell the hosting service, you can use these server resources to operate your own web sites and save money in the process. However, unlike other web hosting plans, reseller hosting gives you the ability to allocate these server resources to your clients seamlessly. In fact, it even gives you the tools needed to build a web hosting site, create client accounts, designate hosting plans and even bill your customers on a scheduled basis.

Another benefit of reseller hosting is that it offers a great deal of flexibility to the reseller to allocate their server resources to their clients seamlessly. For this reason, instead of getting them from the original web hosting company itself, there are more and more webmasters choose their solutions from web hosting resellers today.

Disadvantage:

In the reseller hosting, you have to share the server with many others. Thus your website would suffer from problems like slow traffic time and might face downtime sometimes. It might result in you losing the customers and business too.

As your website is hosted on a shared server, therefore you are prone to security problems as there can be many hacker sites also hosted in the same server who might want to damage your server. You might find a spammer to use up the bandwidth and you losing the business.

Reseller hosting accounts only provide limited IP addresses with which you can host your clients’ websites. Some clients may request multiple IP addresses, in which case you would need to provide justification.

6. COLOCATION WEB HOSTING :

In this type of hosting, you will purchase your own server and have it housed at a web host’s facilities. Similar to dedicated webhosting service, but the user owns the collocated machine. The webhosting company offers the physical space for the server and takes care of the Internet connection and electricity. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client’s machine. In most cases for colocation, the customers have their own administrator visiting the data center to do any hardware upgrades, apart of remote administration for software.

Advantages:

The biggest advantage of colocation is the cost of bandwidth and associated resources. You have full control over the hardware and system part.  Most of these facilities maintain redundant systems and multiple backbones to enable incredibly fast internet connections. In most cases, the monthly fee for a colocation service is significantly cheaper than a dedicated. You’ll have physical access to your server should you need to perform upgrades or administrative tasks that require your physical presence. This is not the case with most managed server hosts.

Disadvantages:

The biggest drawback to colocation is perhaps that a center that’s both reliable and convenient is hard to find.  If you have a staff of your own to manage the systems, you want to find a facility that is relatively close to your business to reduce travel time when upgrades need to be made.  Colocation centers are typically built in large cities near major network hubs. If your business is far from such a place, colocation can be impractical. This is a factor that somewhat limits geographic options.

Even though the bandwidth may be cheaper in some circumstances, spikes in bandwidth can drastically increase your costs. Collocation also requires far more startup capital than a managed hosting solution.

If you’re business and staffs are far from the collocation center, management can be a challenge. You may have to pay extra for the colocation center to manage your equipment for you.

7. FREE WEB HOSTING :

As the old saying goes, “There is no free lunch”. The same goes for web hosting but if you can live with with limited web space, banners, popups, and other restrictions you can get certainly find “free” hosting.

Free web hosting can be a good choice when you just want to build a non-critical website for fun. Very often in a free hosting environment, connection speed is slow, website can be down frequently, and advertising banners is automatically added to your website. Some companies require you to purchase your domain name to receive free hosting services from them, while others offer you a free subdomain under them, such as [yourname.webhost.com]. Be careful as you will not be able to transfer these free subdomains.

Advantage:

The main advantage associated with free web hosting services is that there is no cost.  In this day and age, with the economy the way it is, most everyone is searching out ways to save money.  Choosing a free host, over a host that costs, is one way for website owners to do just that!

Another advantage associated with free web hosting is that most free providers also provide their customers with pre-made website layouts that are really easy to use.  Most people will choose free web hosting for personal web pages, and often do not have the knowledge to set up a site where they must use software programs in order to design their site.  Free web hosts are great choices for these website owners.

Disadvantage:

With free hosts be prepared to see your website online for the least period of time. The downtime of your website will be never ending if you are using free hosting. There is less space available and the band width is also low. You do not get multiple email accounts for managing your website with free web hosting service. Many times, very little storage is provided. There will be too many advertisements in your website. The chances of being spammed and hacked are always high with a free web hosting company. A free web hosting company truly proves the statement you get what you pay for. You pay nothing so you get nothing in return.

Search Engines does not index such website. Directory does not allow such website. Ad sense is normally not available on such website. It means if you want to earn money through internet, then this is another major disadvantage.

Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages associated with free web host servers is the fact that many of them do not offer customer service of any kind.  This means if you have problems or difficulty with your website, there will be no one available to address the problem.  It is very rare you will even be notified as to down town.