Types of Web Hosting

The internet is emerging fast and big and today we have a variety of options to host our website than we had earlier. If you have hosted websites before and you have heard of or used hosting companies before then this article can be brushed aside and you can start looking into our recommendations for various types of hosts.

Types of hosts

• 1. Shared Hosting
• 2. VPS Hosting
• 3. Dedicated Hosting
• 4. Application Specific Hosting
• 5. Cloud Hosting

##### Shared Hosting

This is by far the most popular and the cheapest of all types of hosts available. As the name suggests your website will reside in a server along with hundreds if not thousands of other websites, sharing its resources like CPU, Memory and Bandwidth.

The hosting company generally ensures that your website doesn’t get dragged by other websites making a win-win situation. But this also means that you will not be eating up the resources of the server yourself. What this essentially means is that you can host websites or blogs that gets average traffic in a given month. Your personal blog post will do just fine. But when it gets viral you will have to start looking further down the rabbit hole. No more blue pill.

Shared Hosting companies offer other nice features too. Most provide one click installers for applications like wordpress, drupal and other content management systems. You also get to host multiple websites with your account if you pay more. Many Shared Hosting Companies advertise that they allow unlimited domains to be hosted on your account, but you will have to take that with a pinch of salt. Godaddy, one of the most popular domain registrar and web hosting provider states explicitly that they recommend hosting not more than 10 websites even on their unlimited plans.

VPS Hosting

According to Wikipedia, A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. Almost all shared hosting providers have a vps plan available.

Dedicated Hosting

As stated it is a full pc that you can rent for a month. Processor, ram and hard drive is not shared with anybody else. Dedicated hosting is getting less popular these days as the dedicated server is only on one location and users opt for something that is available accross multiple regions.

Application Specific Hosting

Taking inspiration from cpanel and other web management tools which give one click installers for many applications like wordpress, drupal etc, Application Specific Hosting providers give you readymade server with your choice of application installed. Applications include but is not limited to django, node etc. Some service providers include Linode, Webfaction etc.

Cloud Hosting

This is the hottest word in the world of hosting. The idea behind is simmple you own no infrastructure of your own to maintain your application. Instead you could provision as many servers rapidly with minimal management effort. This is sort of renting a super computer with the only difference that you can rent them on an hourly basis. What differentiates cloud from dedicated hosting is the instantanious scaling both horizontally and vertically you get in the former. Gone are those days when you wanted to upgrade your hard drive to a bigger capacity, you would contact the Hosting Company who in turn will attach additional hard drive of your choice, physically on the server, taking away valuable time. In cloud computing it is near instant. One more advantage of cloud hosting is the multi regional availability that you get from these services. Cloud is the current happening thing and it will continue to be so. Big players like Amazon launched AWS and not wanting to be left behind, google and microsoft later on launched their own cloud services viz Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Ofcourse there are other small and big players in this market like vultr, rackspace, digital ocean and others. Many shared hosting service providers have shifted some gears and started offering cloud services too.