We all know about Web hosting however many of us neglect this important aspect of website development when it comes actually. When you hire someone to develop a website for you, they won’t tell you much about hosting. The one they choose might be the cheapest and may not be best for you. So you must be aware of it beforehand.
I was also unaware about this initially when I first started developing websites and now I knew where to host. Currently using 7 different hosting companies to host websites. I will be writing a post soon on best hosting companies as I have tried over 25 different hosting companies.
Lets get started, first we need to plan a few things like our budget, size of our website, approx monthly visitors to site etc. Then we need to decide between Linux or Windows hosting. Server location also plays an important role in web hosting. Its better to choose the nearest server location.
Then comes the types of web hosting. Basically most of the hosting companies divide their hosting services into following types
1. Shared hosting
The most widely used hosting type is shared hosting. In this type of hosting, a single server hosts numerous website from different users. They will give you a fixed quota of several GB of webspace and number of website you can host on it. They further categorize this into various plans based on space, number of website, database, bandwidth etc. They provide your with a web hosting control panel viz. Plesk, Cpanel, zpanel etc where you can manage your hosting. This is the cheapest of all hosting types and starts as low as 100/- per month and can be 1000/- per month depending on the space and other features.
2. Reseller hosting
If you want to resale hosting to other users this hosting is for you. This is for a small hosting company or web development company. It is something like retailer. You will buy 100 GB of space and then resale it in smaller chunks as per user requirement. They will provide a control panel (like WHM ) where you can create accounts for individual users.
3. VPS(Virtual Private Server) hosting
Virtual private hosting is also an upgraded shared hosting but have higher performance. There is one physical server but acts as private server for each user. The number of users are also less and they share the server resources equally. Even they share the resources but each user is been treated as dedicated. For instance if you have a plan in which you get 2 GB RAM and the server has 16 GB of RAM divided between 8 users equally. So once you reach the 2 GB RAM, you won’t get any resources from others. They are bit expensive.
4. Cloud hosting
A rather new type of hosting type is somewhat similar to VPS hosting in the sense that in it many individual servers are connected to each other to act a one large server which shares each other resources. This is much beneficial when we further want to extend resources, we can just add another server to the network.
5. Dedicated hosting
In this type of hosting they will provide you full access to a server which you can manage of your own. This is mostly owned by big companies or IT companies. Here they allow maximum customization to the server as per your requirement. There are the most expensive of all hosting types. This has few demerits too that you have to fully manage the server, may install OS, manage softwares, security checks, scan malware and remove them etc.