Smartly select a web hosting plan to run your website smoothly at the minimum cost

As the name says, web hosting is a process of hosting your website on a web server to make it available for the entire world. And, to host a website, you need to approach a web hosting service provider. Well, that does not mean that you cannot host your website at your own. You can certainly buy a web server, a public IP address and host your website on your own web server. However, running your own web server is a very costly affair and hence, only big companies who run mega-sized websites load their websites on their own servers. In normal cases, it’s wise to host your website on a third-party web server to keep it cost effective. Since the competition in the field of web hosting has drastically increased, almost all the companies have come out with numerous hosting plans to attract more and more customers.    

Shared web hosting plans were the most opted ones until the recent years. Here, more than 50 websites are hosted on the same server and all the websites share the same server resources. Since the many websites are loaded onto the same server, the subscription cost you have to pay for this plan is very low. However, there are a few drawbacks in shared hosting plans. Since the server resources are shared among the websites, the chances for the server to get overloaded are pretty high. If traffic to one site increases all of a sudden, the chances for all the sites loaded onto the server to go down or to work slow are pretty high.

Dedicated web hosting plans have been there since the early days of Internet. As the names say, here the entire web server is dedicated to one subscriber. You can use all the server resources as per your choice and preferences. But this hosting plan is rather expensive. You can either opt for a managed dedicated hosting plan or an unmanaged dedicated plan. If it’s a managed dedicated hosting plan, the server is managed by the experts at the service provider’s end but still you get the full liberty to use the server space and resources the way you want. On the other side, in an unmanaged dedicated hosting plan, the server management becomes your responsibility.

Today, the most preferred plan is the VPS (virtual private server) hosting plan. Here, the server is shared among the subscribers like in shared web hosting plan but each subscriber is assigned a quota. In the sense, each website would be allotted a share of RAM, bandwidth and other server resources. Therefore, even if one website receives high traffic, it’s not going to affect the other websites. 

The quality of the service offered by the web hosting company really matters as your website is going to rely completely on the server hosted by the service provider. If the server is down, your site is going to be down as well. So, do your research well and deal only with a service provider who has a good reputation in the market.