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website mapWeb Hosting Types for Small Businesses: Quick Guide
By Alexander Dolinin on October 6th, 2006
Don’t know the difference between the types of web hosting? This brief guide will explain and help you make an intelligent choice for your small business website.
In case you are new to this, a website host (a.k.a website hosting provider) is a company that hosts your website’s files on their server (computer) at a data center and provides Internet connection for your website. If you think of a website as a book, then a website host is a book store that keeps your book on their shelf, available to visitors.
Now let’s look at the difference between the types of web hosting.
Free Hosting
Shared Hosting (a.k.a. virtual hosting) is the most common and affordable type. As the name implies, your website shares a server with other websites. Returning back to our website-as-a-book analogy: your website would be like a book presented on a shelf at a store, next to many other books on the same shelf. Shared hosting is just fine for the most small business websites that do not anticipate very high traffic or have some unusual requirements. With prices starting at well below $10, shared hosting will suit most of small business websites.
Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS hosting) or Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting is a step above shared hosting. Like with shared hosting, your website shares a physical server with others, but is separated from them virtually, just like it would be on a dedicated server. You get many benefits of a dedicated server at a fraction of price and your website is usually faster, more stable and secure then with shared hosting. Back to our book analogy: your website would be like a book featured in a voting booth-like shelf where visitors can leaf through it in a relative privacy (hey, that’s not a bad idea). Prices start below $30 a month, and if you’ve outgrown a shared hosting plan, but don’t have a budget for a dedicated server, you should consider VPS hosting.
Dedicated Hosting provides a server dedicated only to your website. Expanding our book analogy, this would be the case when only your book would be featured on an entire shelf at the store. You have complete control over the choice of server hardware and software. Server administration is provided either by you or, for an additional fee, by the web host. For websites with very high traffic or demanding applications, a dedicated server is a must. Until then, you might be better off with virtual private server hosting instead of paying at least $130 a month.
Colocation Hosting is like dedicated hosting, but you supply your own server instead of using your web host’s. That would be like supplying your own shelf for your book - unless there is a very good reason for it, or you’re very good at making shelves, that would be kind of silly. In either case, you wouldn’t be reading this introductory guide, so I will skip the details.
There you have it. Now that you have a basic understanding of web hosting types, you can narrow down your choices and start shopping around.
About author: Alexander Dolinin is a search engine optimization specialist with background in web design, web development and project management. He has been building and promoting websites since 1996.
Author's website: http://www.esherpa.net
Tags: Hosting, Website Insights.
