An End to all Hosting Selection Challenges

by Pritee D. Sr. SEO Executive

“Choose wisely. Live well” is the tagline of one of the most popular direct consumer marketing company and it makes more sense when it comes to business. Every decision is business critical and has the ability to push it up or pull it down. In information era, you wouldn’t want a key component like your online business presence to experience anything but the best.

Shared hosting – As name suggests, it allows multiple websites to share the resources of a single server. This includes sharing of server storage space, bandwidth, processing power etc. Hence the cost is also shared…! Small businesses, startups, professionals are often suggested this hosting to cover their cost of capital. Usually, you’ll have no idea what websites you’re sharing the server resources with and technically it poses a potential risk from other sites on the server to one of yours.

Dedicated hosting – Dedicated hosting is the other end on the palette of hosting. As opposed to the shared one, here a server is devoted to a single business for specific purpose like emails, data storage or hosting their website. Since the server can also be set up externally at a data center, you typically lease its resources for your business. This gives you total control over server, best possible performance and flexibility, but at a significant investment. Companies with large websites, offering heavy online stuffs, getting lot of web traffic, generally demand for a dedicated hosting.

Virtual Private Server hosting – My personal favorite and popularly known as VPS hosting, virtualizes a server, enabling it to share the dedicated slices of resources at a lesser cost. In simpler words, you’d still share the server but with allocated resources always dedicated to you. This provides you with power of a dedicated server at a price little higher than the shared hosting.

It combines the goodness of both shared and dedicated types of hosting. Besides this, it has several other benefits. For example, shared hosting comes up with preset hosting environment and configurations that leave little room for customization. In VPS hosting, you get more control over hosting environment while you pay for what you chose like you can ask for linux VPS hosting, windows VPS hosting, cPanel VPS etc. Also, it has technically no limitations in terms of server resources. As your website grow, you can upgrade your resource package and voila! You get more resources at your service. Further, with dedicated servers one challenging thing is setting these up and maintenance. Now this is not only time consuming but also requires additional cost. Managed VPS hosting makes this lot easier with control panel access and dedicated support teams to help.

You must have heard other hosting names as well like Colocation Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Reseller Hosting etc. But these are just structurally derived forms of basic hosting architectures as explained above. Choosing the right hosting plan should always be backed by your requirements and returns on investments.