Hosting

Choosing the right Hosting company is one of the first decisions any entrepreneur or online business owner has to make. It is important to find the right balance between affordability, reliability and speed. Setting up a website is an exciting experience and most people can’t wait to get going, however you first need to make the right decision regarding which Hosting company to use, in order to save yourself headaches and problems in the future.

What is Hosting?

Web Hosting or ‘Hosting’ is a service provided by a vendor which offers a physical location for the storage of web pages and files. It is where the files that make up your website are kept, and where they are served to your visitors from. There are a variety of types of Hosting and package sizes, and which to choose depends on the amount of information on your site and the number of visitors you expect to receive. In this guide we will explain what the different types of hosting are and what you should take in to consideration before choosing who to go with, whilst trying to decipher some of the jargon around Hosting.

The Different Types of Hosting

There are 3 main types of hosting which almost all available packages fall in to, these are shared web hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated servers. Each of these gives a greater level of performance than the last, but also comes at more of a premium than the last. We will now explain exactly what each of these 3 types of Hosting are and what they entail.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting, with many websites hosted on the same server, is the most common form of web hosting service. Numerous clients websites are housed together to share the same resources (processor, memory, bandwidth, software), and the number of sites per server can be up into the hundreds. This means that the popularity of other sites on the same server may impact the speed of your site. However this is the most affordable form of Hosting and a great place to start your site before perhaps moving on to one of the other types of hosting as your site grows in popularity.

In recent years, this hosting option has dynamically grown to become the most popular one.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

A Virtual Private Server (abbreviated as VPS) is a dedicated section of a server that is divided or partitioned into several parts to operate like multiple servers. Virtual Private Servers are usually the next step up from shared hosting, and they’re a step below dedicated hosting.

Virtual Private Servers give you your own completely dedicated section of the machine, which acts as its own operating system. This means the popularity of other sites on the server won’t impact the speed at which your site loads, whilst still being more affordable than dedicated hosting.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated hosting is the renting of a server from a web hosting provider. The server is not shared by anyone else, which gives you full and complete control of the machine. This is the best and fastest form of Hosting, although obviously you can expect to pay a little more the dedicated service which you receive.

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