The Nameify Blog

Each type of web site hosting meets a different need.

Prices increase as features are added. Choosing the right type for your needs is a matter of informing yourself of the options and matching what you want to accomplish with what is available.

If it’s free, it’s for me!

Free is generally good.

But, even free has a cost. Services that offer free hosting usually recoup their investment by requiring ad space on your page. Yahoo offers geocities under this model. They run a frame along the right side of the page with their ads. Any traffic to your site becomes traffic for their ads. This doesn’t mean that free hosting sites aren’t useful.

Creative webmasters sometimes use free hosting sites in combination (with offsite linking of files) to give the appearance of a more sophisticated and larger site than is actually there. For instance, if I have a chain of free sites, I can link files between them so that clicking a picture on one site brings up information or a graphic stored on another free site. This was a more common technique when free hosting sites limited storage space, but is still used for linking to a blog or video hosted elsewhere.

So, free sites can be used to ‘patch’ a network of sites across the Internet. They can be used to hold and display microsite sales material or feeder ads. The downside of this is that many free hosting services regulate against just these techniques- they don’t want marketers to take advantage of what is designed for entry-level users to post a homepage.

Pay a little, get a lot.

The next higher in cost is a shared hosting site. The cost is still minimal (as little as $5 a month) because shared hosting uses one server, running one platform, to manage many different domain names. Visitors to your site ideally cannot tell it is a shared site- they see everything normally. No ads (other than your own) appear.

The differences are behind the scenes. Shared hosting usually means limits on what is possible on any particular service. If a shared hosting server doesn’t have the software for running/sharing videos, then that option isn’t available. Bandwidth is limited by how many accounts are being served at any one time. There may be space and feature limitations imposed by the hosting company because of this. However, for most small to medium businesses that don’t have media-heavy domains, this is option is probably ideal. Low cost and all the functionality small businesses need.

Pay more, get more.

Next up is virtual dedicated hosting. The only difference (besides a higher price) here is that server software isn’t shared between domain holders. Each user gets to install and run their own particular (often customized) server side software. All of the different domains run on the same computer, but directories and functionality isn’t shared. If one virtual server goes down, the others may continue running. If you need streaming video applications or prefer one type of server software over another, you can get it.

This type of hosting allows more flexibility while still keeping costs down because hardware is shared by multiple domains.

Pay lots, get lots.

Finally, there is dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting means one machine (or more) is dedicated solely to your account. You get the software you prefer and the machine to run it on. Maintenance and repair for that machine (as well as Internet connection and a physical location) are part of the package. This would be attractive for a large company who is running large data and throughput applications.

Dedicated hosting also allows buyers to resell space on ‘their’ computer to other domain holders in a dedicated/shared model. Security is much better and redundancy (which means less downtime) is a concern for companies that use dedicated hosting- they can get two dedicated servers and reduce the chances of ever going ‘off the net’.

Which is right for you?

It depends mostly on what your site is meant to do. Newbies and individuals probably will get by with free hosting.

Small business owners and people not selling directly from the web will find shared hosting a good buy. Larger businesses who are selling directly or have a high volume of traffic would more likely need virtual dedicated hosting. And the grand corporations (or any other class of domain owner that grows huge) will need dedicated hosting, and eventually their own server pod, technical support staff and ‘big pipe’ connection.

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