There are many variations of website hosting out there that you can buy, rent, or get at no charge. With a high selection of options comes to a vast variety of choice that may leave some people confused about what they are buying. In this blog, I am going to cover a selection of different hosting types, highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each one of them, and give tips whether this is the right type of hosting for you.
Shared Website Hosting
When on a shared website hosting plan, your website is on a server that is hosting other websites in addition to yours.
The advantages of being on a shared hosting server are that it is usually rather cheap to be on due to the cost of the server being split between all of the other sites that are on that server. The issues of using a shared web hosting server are that all the sites that are sharing that server are also sharing the amount of traffic they can support. If one site is gaining a lot of traffic, the server will dedicate more resources to that website and therefore cause the other websites to slow down. This usually is not an issue if your site is the most popular one on the server, as the server will delegate the resources to you.
This type of hosting is the preferred type of hosting for newer and smaller websites, as they are likely to get less traffic than large sites. This option is usually the desired option for businesses that are starting up online due to their initial lack of traffic.
If you are interested in our shared web hosting plan please contact us on 01925 563 960 or contact us here.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a newer form of website hosting that allows many single servers to coordinate with one another and create what is effectively a super server. This is an effective way of hosting for providers as they can easily add additional servers to the cloud to increase the cloud size.
The advantages of using a cloud-based web-hosting server are that if the traffic to your website suddenly increases the servers will be able to support the additional load without taking your website down. Just be wary that cloud-hosting servers generally operate on a Pay As You Go (PAYG) pricing plan in a similar way that energy bills work where you only pay for what you use. This can be a good pricing plan but it may incur some unexpected charges if the traffic to your site unpredictably spikes.
This type of hosting is best for businesses whose websites are growing quickly and are gaining an increasing amount of traffic.
Dedicated Hosting
With using a dedicated hosting server your website is contained alone in a server with no other websites on it to share resources. Usually, when being on a dedicated hosting server it allows you full access to the root permissions that gives you full control of the server if you wish to use it.
Dedicated servers are the highest form of a server you can have your website hosted. The people who generally use this type of hosting are businesses whose websites have grown into a large online presence and need the dedicated additional resources due to the volume of traffic they are receiving.
If you are interested in our dedicated website hosting plan please contact us on 01925 563 960 or contact us here.
Free Hosting
Using free web hosting means, somebody somewhere will let you keep your website on their server for no charge. This hosting type is generally a shared web hosting plan but without the charge. These companies regain the profits lost on using free hosting by adding advertisements to your website and limiting the amount of server space your website can use.
The advantage of free hosting is, as the name would suggest, the hosting does not cost. There are not many other advantages to free hosting however as the companies are still a business that needs to make money and they employ other tactics to their hosting to make you pay money in order for them to change or remove something. Adding their domain to your domain, placing ads all throughout your site or limiting the uptime on your site are just a few of the ways that they try and get you to pay for their hosting.
This type of hosting may not be good for businesses or anybody trying to gain a lot of traffic from their website but it is useful for anybody who just wants to mess around with creating a website or for people with small personal projects.
If you are interested in knowing more about our website hosting plans or would like any of our other services, please contact us on 01925 563 960 or contact us here.
