Friday, June 10, 2011

What are the different hosting types and how they affect you

By Ricardo d Argence


You've finally completed the task of designing your website's pages, and you've assembled all the content you want to put there. You've also found a company that could be the ideal web host - a full-featured hosting service guaranteeing not only reliability but stability at a cost that you've decided is reasonable. Your work's not over, however, because you're now facing yet another highly important task - selecting the appropriate type of webhosting.

Don\'t make the mistake of subscribing to the wrong hosting type; otherwise you will lose either opportunities or money. Before you sign up, you should know what purpose a specific hosting type serves first. Below is the list of the different types of hosting together with their inherent strengths and weaknesses

1. Free hosting

Free web hosting will work just fine if you don't mind having ads on your website, a restricted amount of disk space and limited web features. Unfortunately, free webhosting usually comes with features that are not only limited but also unreliable. You also won't have any live support to fall back on if your website goes down. These limitations mean that free webhosting isn't recommended for large sites that receive a lot of traffic. Free web hosting can, however, be helpful for students and others who aren't able to afford to pay for hosting in order to have a small website. Free hosting provides a subscriber with a subdomain (for example, subdomain.domain.com) instead of a full domain.

2. Shared Hosting

This type of hosting is most preferred by the majority of website owners today. Webmasters who don\'t have enough financial resources to pay for a dedicated server turn to shared hosting. This is because shared hosting is cheaper and doesn\'t have the disadvantages found in free hosting. In shared hosting, technical support is provided. This type of hosting is recommended to owners of personal websites and small business sites.

You will not have complete control over your server if you choose shared webhosting. Your website's performance may be impacted if other website owners sharing your server exceed their bandwidth or disk space limits.

3. Dedicated Webhosting

If you're willing to shell out some additional cash because you don't want the actions of others to affect your available bandwidth or disk space, choose a dedicated web hosting option. This choice will give you greater control over the server because you will be the only one who is using its resources. Dedicated servers can handle immense traffic and large numbers of file requests. You'll have two options to choose from with dedicated hosting managed and unmanaged. Managed hosting means your server will be maintained and monitored by a skilled web administrator. You'll do the server maintenance if you choose unmanaged dedicated web hosting.

4. Colocation

You could even decide to buy your own server, but you'll need to install it in a location that has the facilities available to operate it. Typically, this means your server will be installed in a telecommunication company's data center. This arrangement is known as colocation, and it can be an expensive type of web hosting. Most experts only recommend colocation for hosting a large, complicated, profitable website.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment