Types of Web Hosting: what is Right for Your Business

Starting a website requires in the first place finding solid ground for its deployment. This solid ground consists in the first place of a hosting solution. You’ll have to find a suitable provider (for example hostzealot.com), the right type of hosting, and choose the right plan. Today we want to focus on the second aspect – choosing the right hosting type. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

What Do Hosting Types Derive from?

Hosting suggests using a server, which is a special computing unit, that is connected to the network to provide your website is online and works. Using a whole server to host your website is known as dedicated hosting and provides your web project with maximum resources while coming for the maximum price. Other hosting types are based on different approaches to make hosting more flexible and affordable to a broader audience. Let’s have a look at different hosting types, their advantages and disadvantages as well as the usage cases starting with the dedicated hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting gives you the entirety of resources that are available on a single server unit. This gives you the maximum freedom to deploy resource-demanding projects but also needs a bigger investment from your side.

Advantages of a dedicated server:

• Maximum resources: Get all the server has to offer to realize the most ambitious web projects.
• Maximum security: Your security cannot be compromised by other server tenants while the capacities allow you to implement any kind of security measures.
• Configurability: The server is yours so feel free to apply any configuration.

Disadvantages:

• Cost: Dedicates server is by far one of the most expensive hosting options by default, so you won’t rent it without knowing why exactly you need it.
• Less flexibility: Since you get a whole server at your disposal, you won’t be able to regular the number of its resources. If you need more capacities, you just rent another server and migrate to it.

As you have most likely understood, a dedicated server is a solution for ambitious projects that need maximum resources. This can be a big website with dozens of pages and hundreds of visitors, like an e-commerce website, a gaming server for a resource-demanding game, or something that has to do with deploying other kinds of heavy applications.

The problem with dedicated hosting is that you cannot unselect the resources you don’t need and get a lower price if you have a project of a smaller scale. The following hosting types are meant as a solution to this problem.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a hosting type that is literally based on sharing the resources of a single server between dozens of users. The servers provided by it are pretty affordable, so you can launch a website almost without any budget, but there are a bunch of drawbacks due to the way it is created. The main advantage of it is hence the price, while its disadvantages build up a list:

• Poor stability: In shared hosting there is no strict distribution of resources and for this reason, its performance is unpredictable. It can get overloaded by numerous users trying to get the most out of it at the same time, especially in the case of overselling.
• Poor security: The fact that you share the same virtual environment with a number of tenants makes you helpless if it is intruded on by cyber criminals. Once one tenant is hacked, everybody on the server is under threat. At the same time, the available security measures are limited by the lack of virtualization.
• No scalability: With shared hosting, you get an undefined number of resources. This may be sufficient for a small project, but you won’t be able to grow.

Summing up, we can say that shared hosting may be a suitable option for novice projects with low budgets or for projects that are not supposed to grow. At the same time, considering the vulnerability of shared hosting, you should use it for projects that contain valuable files and sensitive information.

Virtual Private Hosting

A Virtual Private Server or a VPS can be considered a compromise between the affordability of shared hosting and the performance, security, and configurability of dedicated servers. VPS servers are as well based on sharing the resources of a single physical server, but it is done here with a differen approach – through virtualization technology.

Without diving deep into the technical details, virtualization is a technological approach that allows diving a physical environment into several independent virtual ones, ideally with dedicated resources, a dedicated operating system, and other parameters. Thus we get something that works qualitatively equal to a dedicated server while being quantitatively less and thus more affordable. Its advantages are:

• Reliable performance: Virtualization makes the performance of a VPS almost as good as one of a dedicated server but on a smaller scale.
• Root access: With a VPS you can configure the very core of your server. Install the OS of your choice, any applications, have a separate IP address, and many more.
• Price: VPS servers offer a broad selection of pricing plans with different sets of resources to fit any technical requirements and budget.
• Scalability: You get a fixed number of resources but it can be easily modified over time as you grow. Just contact your hoster and your plan can be upgraded very soon. No need for migration, you just get your resources increased in a matter of minutes.

As you can see, a VPS is a reliable, versatile, and flexible solution that is suitable for the vast majority of projects that don’t need an extreme level of performance, but still require stability and precision. The only drawback of a VPS is that it cannot be as powerful as a dedicated server, which is however a bit different category of prices and capacities.

Conclusion

The right choice of hosting type is a crucial step in starting any kind of web presence. In this article, we’ve discussed the three main types – dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and shared hosting. We hope that the explanation was insightful and we wish you good luck in choosing the right solution for your project. Thank you for your attention!