How to Navigate Web Hosting Choices

Mar 9
07:22

2011

Craig Thornburrow

Craig Thornburrow

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When it comes to getting your websites online you have a lot of web hosting choices. The first thing you need to do is determine what type of web hosting will best meet your needs.

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When it comes to getting your websites online you have a lot of web hosting choices. Choosing the right type of hosting and the right host will save you a ton of headaches down the road.

The first thing you need to do is determine what type of web hosting will best meet your needs. There are 3 main types of web hosting although there are many specialty types available as well.

The three main types of web hosting are shared,How to Navigate Web Hosting Choices Articles dedicated and cloud hosting.

Shared hosting is just that it means that your site will share server space with other websites that hosting company has as customers.

The benefits of a shared hosting plan are that it is relatively inexpensive and the main providers in the shared hosting arena offer great customer service. The downside of shared hosting is that because your server is shared you can also be negatively affected by other sites on the same server. Shared hosting can be slow and if a site on your server is being attacked it is the same as you being attacked and your site will suffer.

Dedicated hosting means that you do not share your hosting with anyone. You have a server in the host’s data center that is dedicated to you. The benefit of dedicated hosting is that you have more bandwidth allocated just to you so you can serve content quicker and to larger groups of people than shared hosting.

Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting but is still inexpensive enough that an average business can easily afford the monthly charges.

The third type of hosting is cloud hosting. Cloud hosting means that your website is hosted in the cloud and served to people through a distributed content network. Cloud hosting is sold a little differently it is sold by use as opposed to a flat monthly fee. You pay for bandwidth, cpu usage, memory usage and storage.

Although the fee structure is a little complicated for a small site it is still affordable. Bigger sites with a lot of traffic or server side computing going on would pay more than a standard website. The huge benefit however is that page load times and computing power time are significantly higher than regular hardware hosting. Being on the cloud can improve page load times by up to 200% over a standard shared host.

If you identify your needs and do a little research you will find you can narrow the web hosting choices for your company down considerably.