The Ultimate Clean Sheet on Hosting

Web hosting is very critical, when it comes to your website’s availability to the public. You have to consider the most suitable hosting, depending on what you will be using your website for. In simple terms, your web hosting should match up to your website usage and needs. If you go for a web hosting that is not suitable for your site, you will end up constantly having functionality issues, which is very detrimental.

Various Types of Hosting Options

Shared web hosting

In this sort of web hosting, you will be sharing resources with multiple other websites. Due to the sharing aspect, such web hosting options are usually cheaper, because the service providers can host thousands of websites at a cheap price and will still make a lot of profit. This type of web hosting is very popular among small and medium websites, because it is concurrent with their needs. The service providers normally invest a lot in the basic infrastructure, in terms of equipment and personnel, which means that the user will find an already laid out framework, and the only thing they need to do is to start uploading content on the site. The following features make shared web hosting very appealing to small and medium-size websites:

Cost-effective – shared web hosting is usually very cheap, but there is no general price and it normally depends on the service provider. However, since they are hosting multiple websites, they are usually cheaper and are the best option for someone who is running on a low budget, or if your activities or services do not involve critical and highly confidential information.

Ease of use – since the basic framework and infrastructure has already been set up; all the user needs to do is upload content, and run your website. There is no burden on the website owner, in terms of maintenance and security update costs, because all this is taken care of by the web hosting provider. This means that you can easily run such a website even if you are not an IT wizard, because most of the settings are straight forward. Perhaps this explains why shared web hosting is very popular.

It’s demerits:

Less control the user has less control, because most of the external framework is carried out by the host. This means that updates and relevant changes can be carried without the user’s permission; since the hosting provider normally does what they think is important for everyone. As a user you will mostly be in control of internal functions such as what is in the web pages and your data files.

Susceptibility to downtime and slow response due to the aspect of shared resources, it is very possible for the servers to become overwhelmed sometimes, and this means that everyone will not get a good experience, mostly the site’s visitors. Moreover, since the web owner has limited control, response to such an issue may take longer than the web owner would desire, and may ultimately result to huge losses.

Self Hosting

This occurs when a web owner decides to individually host a website on their own, instead on hiring some hosting space or outsourcing web hosting services. However, this is only advisable for someone who has the resources to purchase the equipment and hire extra personnel. In terms of equipment, you need powerful servers, firewalls and a reliable internet connection to ensure that your web pages are available 24/7 to your site’s visitors. Moreover you will also need to hire a few people to monitor the website, because you cannot be available on a 24/7 basis just to monitor the site on your own. Self-hosting is a very expensive venture, but its major advantage is the fact that the web owner has more control. Self-hosting is more suitable for big organizations which have the resources to invest in the basic infrastructure.

Dedicated hosting

Here, you get a server that is fully dedicated to your website. This means that despite hiring the web hosting services, you will be given some space on the internet which is fully dedicated to you. This means that you will enjoy:

Freedom You will have the freedom to configure and setup the server to scale up to your needs/ desires. This therefore means that you can reduce chances of any breach in security by ensuring that you have the strongest firewalls installed. This also means that you have more control, over your website, and you can implement any drastic changes without consulting anyone.

Functionality You will be guaranteed of high performance, since you are not sharing resources with any other users. This means that your website can accommodate high traffic without any difficulty. Your site’s visitors will also enjoy faster data transfer, which will translate to a great experience to anyone who visits your site; after all, we all hate slow responding sites, which take ages to load pages. Dedicated hosting is essential for busy sites, since they have a huge number of people visiting at any particular period of time; downtime would therefore be a huge blow, and may result to loss of revenue.

The major downside of dedicated hosting is the fact that it is expensive, since you have major resources and personnel dedicated to your website, such a privilege definitely comes at a price. However, people who go for dedicated hosting are always able to break-even on the cost, since their website`s income streams are also higher.

Cloud hosting

Hosting is done through multiple servers which are interconnected. The multiple servers act as a single unit or system, which is very advantageous because it translates to high performance. It means that the breakdown of one server will not have a huge impact on the websites operations, because despite being interconnected, the servers also function independently.

Unlike other types of hosting which rely on a single server, this type of hosting means?

• Very low possibility of downtime
• It is very cost effective
• More secure
• It has the ability to handle high traffic

It is very important to think carefully before your choose any type of hosting, in order to ensure that you get the best service out of your web hosting.