Various types of web hosting services are available for hosting your website and Application. Before signing up with any web hosting services provider, you need to evaluate the kind of service your website or application needs. Other things to be taken into consideration are budget, resource utilization estimation, and services or add-ons provided by your web hosting provider.
As you progress and grow in your business, your web hosting needs will also increase and becomes more intense and complex. Free web hosting plan along with some inexpensive shared hosting plans are good to start with your business, website or application when it is in the startup phase. As your website traffic grows and continues to grow, you will need a high performance, secure and scalable web hosting plans to opt. Hence there are several types of web hosting plans and services are available for you all the time to choose from as mentioned below.
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Server Hosting
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting Environment, you along with the other website/application owners shared one common server. Sharing one common server means sharing the physical server and software application within the server. Shared Hosting is affordable and cheap for the startups or the inception stage for any startup or website developers because the cost of operating the server is shared among all the participant’s website owners. However there are some flaws too for the shared hosting, there is a very high risk of a security breach as the data, application code for all the participants resides on the same common server. Also, as there are so many websites/applications hosted on the same shared server the major downside is the slower server speed and responses. Overall shared hosting is suitable for the beginners, bloggers, startups as it is very cheap hosting and doesn’t add much to your IT cost of business.
VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, These servers share one physical server but acts like multiple, separate servers. VPS gives you a flexibility of having a standalone server while having allocated a dedicated amount of physical resources. A single dedicated server breaks into several small servers through a virtualization software and the virtualization layer so created ensures that each VPS acts as a standalone server. VPS imparts the high performance and security as compared to the Shared Hosting. VPS Server is scalable to hence you can increase the amount of resources required without any downtime. VPS Hosting is fast as compared to Shared hosting and is suitable for the Website developers, SMBs and startups and the organizations and the company with less traffic and moderate server performance expectation.
Dedicated Hosting
In a dedicated server environment, you have the entire server physical resources for yourself. Dedicated Servers are for faster performance, and you have all the server’s resources entirely, without sharing with any other websites/application owners. Dedicated server imparts lots of flexibility regarding scalability; you can downgrade or upgrade your dedicated server plans any time (subject to your web hosting provider). Dedicated Server is a significant financial and technical investment. Hence you need to evaluate all the factors and services level of your web hosting provider before making this move. A dedicated server is very secure and is an excellent choice for the business/website/application that requires a lot of system resources or need higher computational power and high level of security.
Conclusion
Choosing a hosting package can be a little cumbersome task for you. The first step is to understand the hosting you need: shared hosting, VPS Hosting or a Dedicated server. Hopefully, this article might have given you insights and pros and cons of each hosting.
