Friday, June 3, 2011

Understanding Different Types of Web Hosting

By Matt Ewing


Web hosting has become a much sought after activity in terms of online business, especially after the rapid advancement of Internet services. You have the space to 'host' your personal homepage, or business profile and webpage through a web hosting company. As even your prospective employers might want to look at your personal thoughts or other details from your own web page, using a web hosting company can thus prove very profitable to you. By creating great networks through your business website, you can successfully expand and consolidate your business over the Internet. One must understand the importance of web hosting for all of this to work.

There are a lot of types of web hosting services like free and paid hosting, shared and clustered web hosting, file and dedicated web hosting, etc. So when you select a web host, you have to consider your needs for it.

Some common types of web hosting are mentioned below:

Shared hosting

A shared host is a server which supports many web pages. A shared host is generally the best for a business where the expenses does not permit them to go for the dedicated web hosting services, and a shared hosting helps them save a lot of unnecessary expenses as well.

The shared web hosting provider, much like dedicated hosting, provides the customers a lot of features like management of server, backup of files, security updates, etc.

Web hosting is primarily done in two ways: the IP address based way and the name based way. In the IP address way, the host who has his own individual IP address provides each of the sites he hosts with their own SSL certificate, thereby endowing a sense of security to the websites. While for name based hosting, the various web sites hosted are provided with a single IP address which is to be used by all.

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.

Despite the cost effectiveness of a shared web hosting system, some of its other problems are that of disk space, CPU and Bandwidth of your website being affected or slowed down because of other sites using the same server. Control over certain system level things like scripts and the system software being used is also beyond your control if you are on a shared hosting system. But if your website is relatively small you can comfortably make do without such features. If such things do bother you and you want some control over the things that power your website, you might want to know about Virtual Private Server or VPS.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

A VPS like a shared server also has one server only, but the software of the system divides it into several 'virtual machines'. Therefore though the server's total resources are still shared by the various websites being hosted but each such VPS gets their own allotment of RAM, disk space etc and operate completely independently using the allocated resources.

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 kind of access that you may get to the main server in case of VPS is almost similar to the kind of access that you could get in a dedicated server. The only difference is that installing software and scripts can be done at a much lower cost in the case of 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.

Dedicated web hosting is the best choice is you need high amount of bandwidth, more disk space and a customized server. Besides, you get to choose the features for the website as well, like the software, settings, operating system and multimedia requirements. It's a good option to consider if you can't manage a private server due to limited expenses.

Your expenses can be saved up to 85% with a dedicated server. You may not have the financial resources and technical know-how to maintain, install and run your own IT staff but have a high traffic to your website. Then, if you can not pay for a network administrator, the programs will run everything smoothly and most of the other functions.

Using a dedicated server also offers 100% assurance and security to you, because you know that you are the only one who is using this server. Apart from security concerns, not having other sites on the server also nullifies issues about downtime problems. Companies that need to have client databases and other important information up on their sites are bound to feel much safer using a managed dedicated host which provides the client with an extra layer of data security.

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!




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