Everything You Need to Know about Website Hosting

This is a guest post by my friend and website designer/builder/programmer, Rob Orr.

What was your first encounter like with website hosting? If you’re like me it was something that you knew you had to have to get your website up and running. I didn’t know a lot about it, only that I wanted something cheap. I didn’t know the difference between shared hosting, or dedicated servers, or even the difference between Windows hosting and Linux.

What is Website Hosting?

Website hosting is something every aspiring internet entrepreneur has to confront. When I got started with my website all those years ago, I didn’t know anything. But I could tell when my website performance was bad. As I learned more and more I came to understand how to nail this thing down and get exactly what I needed with the performance I wanted, all at a reasonable price.

There was much trial and error for sure. Some web hosting companies were just plain bad, others were good, but I’ve been with my company now for several years and I’m getting exactly what I want and need. At its most basic, website hosting is where your website files are stored so others can view your site.

The excitement of getting your new website up can quickly be overcome with confusion as you look at all the options. A solid web host is essential to the success of your site.

So what are all these different hosting options? What are the advantages of one kind of hosting over another? What do I need to do? First step is to backup and relax – we’ve got your back! This post covers the different kinds of hosting service, what’s best about each one, and where you could run in to trouble.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most basic and cheapest of website hosting, and it’s usually the type of service you hear about when people are asking their friends about hosting. A “shared” hosting plan means that there are several sites hosted together on a single server. This also means that your site can be on the same server with up to several hundred other sites. Shared hosting accounts have a prescribed allotment of disk space and bandwidth but all sites on the server are pulling from the same pool and sometimes this can lead to performance problems.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is newer innovation in the world of web hosting. Cloud hosting gives you many of the performance advantages of VPS (Virtual Private Server) and dedicated server-type performance, but it’s much more reasonable in terms of price. The biggest benefit to cloud hosting is its scalability. Your site is hosted on a network of connected computers, and your site has its own cluster on that network.

Performance is stellar due to your site’s access to multiple networked servers thereby overcoming performance issues that are common in shared hosting environments. Traffic issues on one site will not negatively affect your site because the system simply scales to meet the increased demands. While you don’t have the fine-grained control over your hosting environment as you would with VPS and dedicated hosting, you still have great flexibility and powerful performance available to you.

Virtual Private Server

For sites that need more control and absolutely must have solid consistent performance VPS hosting can be a good choice. VPS hosting means that you have your own “virtual private server” that has only one website on it – yours. All the disk space, RAM, bandwidth is solely devoted your site and yours alone.

VPS servers are virtualized servers, which is essentially one powerful computer that is partitioned in to several completely different virtual machines that are configured to perform as a stand-alone computer and run one website. You get a lot of control with a VPS plan so knowing what you’re doing with a server is important if your plan is not a professionally managed plan.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Servers are the top of the line. Some sites have one, some have thousands (think Amazon, Facebook, etc.). A dedicated server is exactly what it sounds like – an entire server computer dedicated to running your website. As with the VPS server, all the computer’s resources are dedicated to powering your site.

Dedicated servers are often used by companies and small businesses that need a lot of horsepower and control over their hosting environment. They’re as secure as their owners decide to make them to be and often use hardware – not software -firewalls and other security equipment to keep their servers secure. Dedicated servers are the ultimate in control and power and also are professionally managed by teams of computer geeks who’s life ambition is to maximize server performance. It doesn’t really get much better than this, but you’re going to pay for it.

See, it’s not so bad. You can get really high-quality hosting at a reasonable cost. The main things are going to come down to what you need as far as the technology is concerned, how well the service is supported by the hosting company, THEN worry about the price.

Have questions? Let us know in the comments below.

Rob Orr is a professional web designer that helps people create websites that absolutely rock. He does hosting for bloggers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, e-commerce merchants and more at Orracle Hosting and does a podcast for website owners on all things web.