The sites can be different. They may vary from just simple landing pages serving as business cards to presenting someone’s project, or they may contain dozens of pages, run complex applications, and serve hundreds of users each day. But what all websites have in common is that they are to be hosted somehow, they all need hosting.
Of course, the needs of various websites vary as well, and so do the hosting capacities they require. In today’s article, we want to have a look at how to find the best hosting to meet your website’s needs.
What hosting solutions are there and what are they good for?
The main difference that applies to all hosting solutions is their type – the hosting as such consists of renting a piece of physical hardware that provides uninterrupted running of your website. This piece is distributed in different ways among the users of the server, so the different ways of this distribution create different types of hosting. The hosting may be presented by the following services – dedicated server, shared hosting, and VPS hosting.
Let’s start with shared hosting, as this is the most entry-level hosting solution. Shared hosting is a type of hosting that is based on sharing the capacities of one physical server among different users, whereby there is no strict allocation of resources. To illustrate that, imagine renting a room with several roommates.
Each of them has their needs and their habits, which sometimes coexist well with yours, and sometimes not. In a similar way, sometimes you are okay with your neighbors on shared hosting, but sometimes they create troubles that you have no control over. Some of them can, for example, use too much bandwidth or RAM at some points in time, and in these cases, the performance of your website may decrease drastically.
Also, since all sites are located on the same hardware and there are no borders between them, it becomes much easier for hackers to hack all the neighbors if at least one of them is hacked.
With all these peculiarities of shared hosting, it’s recommended for people who do not have high requirements as to the quality of their site’s hosting. If you are going to host a very small webpage and are not very worried about its sometimes unstable performance and the security of the data on it, then go for shared hosting. If you have a more reliable solution, go down the list.
VPS. VPS which is short for a virtual private server is a type of hosting solution which is also based on sharing the capacities of one physical server, but it uses a different technology to distribute its resources.
It is the virtualization technology, and it allows for creating separate virtual private servers that have a fixed amount of resources and providing the users with root access, that allows them to install nearly any application on the VPS, including an independent operating system and their own IP.
Coming back to the example with dormitory, it’s can be compared to renting a separate room – you still have neighbors, but they can’t really bother you.
Since all resources are fixedly allocated, your website will not suffer from unstable performance caused by neighbors and your data will be kept much more safely.
Another benefit of VPS is that it can be provided with very different amounts of resources, which makes it a good solution either for people who want to host a small website, but reliably, or for people who are going to run serious applications and host a huge amount of traffic.
The good thing is that VPS are leased on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you always have the possibility to rescale and opt for a plan with the exact amount of resources needed for your projects.
Dedicated hosting is the last hosting service to be considered today. If no VPS is enough for your project, you can go further and rent a dedicated server, which is basically a whole physical server with all its resources at your disposal, which allows you to run heavy applications, host huge amounts of traffic each day, and store extensive arrays of data.
It’s like renting an entire house where you don’t have any neighbors physically existing. Thus, dedicated hosting is great for big sites, like sites that work with vast databases, large-scale e-commerce websites, video streaming, etc.
The last few words
As you have seen, the choice of hosting options is rather broad, so you will be always able to find something to suit your needs. There are, of course, some more aspects and options that have an effect on how your hosting will work, but we hope that this article has given you some basic idea about hosting options that are available.
By the way, if you are looking for a hosting provider at the moment, we recommend you to check out Hostzealot Hosting Provider, a provider with a vast selection of hosting options as well as locations, affordable prices, and high quality of service.
Thank you for your attention, take care!
Learn more
https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/19-important-features-to-look-for-in-a-web-host–net-13197
