All the basic information you need to know about the types of Website Hosting

A suitable comparison may be brought on this context with a house where you keep all your household item. In this case your furniture and electronic items gets replaced by the heap of computer files including documents, HTML files, videos and images.

Most of the times, ‘Website Hosting’ is actually referred to the company that suitably rents out their servers in order to store all information regarding your website. On top of that they provide the suitable internet connection for your computer to access your website files.

Difference between website Hosting and Data Center

Although used in similar contexts the basic difference between the two is that both refer to different objects. While the term ’data center’ refers to a place or rather a facility to keep all the servers the term Website hosting means the server used to host the website. A data center can thus be a house or even a room or a huge building housing the required equipment and ably supported by redundant power supplies, backup connections for data communications and security devices.

Basics of website Hosting: Types

Before discussing further aspects of Website Hosting, we first need to learn about its types. There are four basic types of Website Hosting namely, Virtual Private server or VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting and cloud hosting. Let us learn briefly about each of them.

1. Shared Hosting: - A single server is used to place more than one website. The number of websites thus placed can range from a few hundreds to even thousands. Server resources such as the CPU or the RAM can be shared by all the domains. Generally, the cost of such a website hosting will decrease and is significantly low than the others. Mostly the websites with mediocre traffic levels which run standard software are typically hosted using this class of server. It is therefore generally widely accepted.

Although very popular shared hosting has its fair share of disadvantages the primary one being its limited ability to handle high traffic situations. There is no root access available here.

1. VPS: - VPS or a Virtual Private Server works by dividing the actual server into many virtual servers. Actually every website shares a single server with a few users but it makes the impression as if every website has its own dedicated server as the user. This is done by allowing every user root access to a virtual space which is their own. Virtual hosting offers a more secure environment for hosting as well as more control over the server than shared hosting.

But it also has a limitation in handling high level traffic or spikes which affects the overall site performance.

1. Dedicated Hosting: - Maximum control over the server can be obtained using dedicated servers because in this case of website hosting you buy or rather rent the whole server exclusively. In cheap dedicated windows server hosting, the server stores only your website.

As Spiderman hardly ever said, “With great power comes great pricing”. People needing maximum control over their servers can only manage to afford such an expensive Website Hosting.
 

1. Cloud Hosting: - High traffic and spikes can be handled most efficiently by Cloud hosting. In this case a group of websites is hosted together by a large team of servers which is generally referred to as Cloud. Although very effective, one can hardly get any root access from this type of Website Hosting.