Due to the rapid speed of success achieved by web hosting companies, web hosting services have become a trend in online business. A web hosting company hosts your website, whether personal or professional. It can also provide you with a host of benefits, and to add to it, your to-be employers might also appreciate seeing your details from your own website, rather than from any other place. Internet has emerged as a great medium for conducting business, and a website is a prerequisite for this purpose, which facilitates the need of a web hosting company. To make such things work, a webmaster must be aware of how important web hosting is.



There are several types of web hosting like shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, free hosting, paid hosting and clustered hosting. While choosing a web host for yourself, choose among these available ones but according to your needs and demands.

Some common types of web hosting are mentioned below:

Shared hosting

In simple terms, this is a situation where a solitary server hosts and supports several web pages. This suits fledgling businesses perfectly who are unable to spend large to acquire dedicated servers and therefore does away with other expenses like maintaining a system administrator.

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.

Web hosting can be conducted in two basic ways: based on the IP address and based on the name. In the former case, the host having his unique IP address provides every website that he hosts with their individual SSL certificates, which gives the website owners a lot of security. In case of the latter way, a lot of websites which the provider hosts are assigned just one IP address, which everyone uses.

The sense of security that comes with the IP based hosting may not come with a shared host. On the other hand, the shared host might come cheaper than the IP based hosting.

There are also several other disadvantages of the name based hosting system like its incompatibility with relatively old browsers. A HTTP/1.0 browser without up gradation will fail to send out requests carrying the host name. Also because they share same digital certificates, Hand name based hosts cannot support HTPPS websites either. And if the Domain Name System or the DNS conks out any website hosted by a name based web host becomes virtually impossible to access.

CPU, disc space, and your website's Bandwidth being affected or slowed as other sites are using the same server are the problems of a cost effective shared web hosting system. This system also puts certain system level things out of your control like scripts and the system software being used. But you can be comfortable without such features if your website is relatively small. You might want to gain knowledge about Virtual Private Sector or VPs if such things do bother you and you want some control over the things powering 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.

Due to the fact that webmasters are allowed more freedom than a shared host, they can perform various operations by running a different operating system and having their unique script and software, which wouldn't affect other websites using the same server.

The liberties associated with dedicated servers are nearly identical to the root level access to the main server that you get in a VPS. At a comparatively lesser price than a dedicated server, you can install your preferred software; create accounts etc in a VPS.

Because of the internal division of a VPS system, the sense of security is much greater than a shared hosting service. In the latter, all sites are at a risk if the main server is hacked into, but that is not the case in a VPS system.

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

Dedicated hosting facilities are meant for individuals and big businesses who are eager to take control of not only their websites but also the functioning process of the web host. A dedicated server offers people the benefit of doing that because as the name suggests, in this case a single website is hosted by a single server. The freedom ad control here is manifold, as the website owner has only to look into the web software related matters and can exercise his freedom as far as that is concerned. While other issues like security, power supervision and data maintenance etc are looked after by the hosting company.

If your website requirements are large bandwidth, greater resources like disk space and if you are looking for a high quality, customized server, opting for a dedicated host seems to be the perfect solution. You can then choose a host of features for your website like operating system, settings, software and multi-media necessities. A dedicated hosting service is also the answer to all those who cannot afford to purchase a server of their own, but want similar services.

A dedicated server can save your expenses to the tune of 85%, if there is a lot of traffic o your website, but you are restricted by the technical knowledge and money to have your personalized IT staff.

As you know that you are the only one using this server, a dedicated server thus offers 100% assurance and security to you. Downtime problems and security issues are also solved if there are no other sites on the server. Companies feel safer using a managed dedicated host providing additional data security. This is especially true for companies that have client databases and other important information up on their sites.

So while the costs of a shared host are less, they are never very secure and never so easily accessible as dedicated web hosts are. Using the latter might require you to shell out some extra expenses, but given that it gives you a very higher level of safety than a shared server makes the additional expenses worth incurring. For purposes of business growth, a dedicated server is a must!