The Nameify Blog

The 4 types of hosting accounts explained…

Free Hosting

There are many times when you are not able to, do not feel like, or don’t need to spend money to host a web site. This could be the case for times when you are building a small site as an experiment or a hobby.

The number of free web hosts has decreased significantly. Some service providers offer free web hosting. Free web hosting is best suited for small sites with low traffic, like family sites or sites about hobbies. It is not recommended for high traffic or for real business. Technical support is often limited, and technical options are few. Very often you cannot use your own domain name at a free site. You have to use a name provided by your host like http://www.freesite.com/users/~yoursite.htm. This is hard to type, hard to remember, and not very professional.

Shared Hosting

Shared web hosting (also called virtual hosting) is the most common type of hosting service used. Shared web hosting means that you are sharing one server (CPU time, memory, OS, applications, bandwidth, etc) with a number of clients of your hosting company.

The webhost manages the server to ensure uptime, upgrading hardware and software. On a shared host it’s common for each website to have their own domain name. Shared solutions often offer multiple software solutions like email, database, and many different editing options. Technical support tends to be good.

The cost of shared hosting often depends on the number of clients being hosted on a server as the hosting company tries to maximize profits per server. You will have no control over the server but full control over your website through a control panel (or CPanel).

When shopping for shared web hosting, you must always check the terms of service to see if there are any scripts or types of software that aren’t allowed by the host. Since all the server resources are shared, it is important to ensure that no one user is hogging the pooled resources. Server software like Apache or IIS allows the administrators to localize any errors or unusual CPU utilization so as to not affect the other users, but there remains a possibility of problems occurring and all the websites on any given server going down.

Virtual Dedicated Hosting

A Virtual Private Server (VPS), also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS), provides the features of a dedicated server for multiple web hosting customers in the form of “virtual computers”.

How can you have a dedicated server if it is being shared by multiple users? With a Virtual Private Server you still share system resources like the CPU and RAM with other users but the resources are allocated in such a way that you cannot tell that the system has anyone else on it, much like a dedicated server.

Resources are usually setup in such a way that each hosting client is only allowed to use an allocated percent, meaning that resources assigned to you will always available to you. Each virtual server looks and acts like a dedicated server.

Dedicated Hosting

With dedicated hosting your web site is hosted on a dedicated server. This makes a dedicated hosting solution especially attractive for large high-traffic websites, custom development projects creating complex web based applications, and web sites that require a high degree of uptime and total control of the hosting environment.

Dedicated hosting is the most expensive form of hosting. The solution is best suited for large web sites with high traffic, and web sites that use special software. You should expect dedicated hosting to be very powerful and secure, with almost unlimited software solutions.

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