Web hosting is an online service that makes your site’s content available on the internet. When purchasing a ‘hosting plan,’ you can rent space on a physical server to store all your website’s data and files.

Web hosts provide hosting technology and the resources required for your site’s secure and effective operation. They are responsible for keeping the server running, implementing security measures, and ensuring data (texts, photos, videos, and other files) is transferred successfully to the user’s browser.

With multiple options for web hosting available, it is challenging to determine which is the best for your needs. Thus, this article discusses the available types of web hosting and their benefits.

Free Hosting

This non-paid web hosting service is available with many prominent sites that offer to host some web pages without cost. This type of hosting is used by websites where the goal is to place advertisements such as banners, etc.

Since this hosting is free, no customer support is provided, and you have no control over your website. There is also very low bandwidth provided; thus, less data can be transferred.

Shared Hosting

In this kind of arrangement, several websites are hosted on one server. For this arrangement, you will have to pay the hosting provider on a monthly basis in exchange for access to a limited number of resources that will be shared with other customers on the same server. These resources may be RAM, bandwidth, storage, CPU, etc.

This hosting is the most affordable option. You usually also have the option to get additional services in these plans, such as a free domain name and SSL certificate, good security, regular anti-malware scans, etc. It also has access to customer support services.

On the other hand, the greatest drawback is that it is shared amongst other users. If one of the users has a lot of traffic, you might get fewer shared resources as the resources are shared. Thus your websites performance and speed may go down.

Moreover, shared hosting is limited to selected environments and programming languages ( HTML, PHP), and there is also a limit on the bandwidth and storage space you have access to. This hosting type is best suited for self-hosted websites, small business websites, part-time bloggers, etc.

Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS)

Unlike a shared hosting package, a VPS is considered an improvement. Your actual server space is still shared with other owners with VPS. However, your site is housed on a separate section of the server. This means you may execute any software and utilize any computer language while gaining access to additional memory and bandwidth.

However, the flexibility of VPS hosting is limited. You are responsible for software patches, security, server performance optimization, and maintenance activities. Therefore, administration and installation require technical knowledge. You also retain minimal server configuration and management.

This hosting plan best suits small to mid-sized online businesses and media-heavy webpages.

Dedicated Server Hosting

This type of hosting gives you exclusive rental rights over a whole server. You are able to take full control of the environment.

Higher traffic is thus only limited by the server infrastructure, which is upgradeable. On the contrary, even though you are not operating the entire server, you still need to pay for all of it. You must have technical knowledge since you will be responsible for setting up the operating system, integrating the components needed to perform your activities, and establishing a security barrier to safeguard your system. Since this hosting has higher computing capabilities and customization, the cost is much higher.

This type of hosting is best used by high-traffic websites, websites that process sensitive customer data, e-commerce websites, etc.

Managed Hosting

This hosting type offers operational support such as hardware and software installation, configuration, upkeep, technical assistance, patching, upgrading, and tracking. The provider is accountable for regularly maintaining the equipment, operating systems, and specified applications with this hosting.

The cost for this type of hosting can vary from user to user, depending on the business size, data, traffic, etc. It is more expensive than Shared hosting and VPS hosting, but it provides a management feature that eliminates the need to keep IT staff on your payroll.

This type of hosting is best suited for growing businesses without any in-house IT staff, small business owners, entrepreneurs, etc.

Cloud Hosting

This hosting gained a lot of popularity in 2021. This technology enables on-demand access to computing resources such as RAM, CPU, storage, security services, and more.

Like VPS, one can rent a piece of a data center that the cloud services provider hosts to run the web application on their infrastructure, consisting of distributed servers. Thus, latency issues are reduced, and resource availability is increased. Some other benefits of cloud-based hosting are higher uptime, immediate scalability, cutting-edge hardware, better security, cloud services, etc.

Therefore, with all these benefits, cloud hosting has become an attractive option for websites requiring significant storage and computing capacities.

This type of hosting is best for web applications, organization websites, e-commerce stores, etc.

Colocation Hosting

Rather than storing the servers in-house or at a private data facility, this hosting allows you to co-locate your hardware by renting space at a co-location facility. The data center provides every vital asset, such as electricity, IP address, connectivity, and cooling equipment.

This provides exposure to greater bandwidth rates than a typical office server at a significantly lesser cost. This strategy is usually used by enterprises that may not have the space/cost to have their own physical data center. This type of hosting is best for enterprises in regulated industries such as government, finance, healthcare, etc.

Endnote

To conclude, for self-hosted websites, web hosting is essential. Your choice of web hosting determines the experience you can provide to your web users and the capacity to handle website traffic.

Before choosing your web hosting type, you must list down your plans for your website, i.e., the type of website you have, the resources you require, your budget, and your expected website traffic, and then in accordance with these factors, choose your type of web hosting.