Four Types of Hosting For Your Blog

What was your first encounter like with website hosting? If you're like me it was something that you knew you needed to get your website active, but not much more. I was completely ignorant - all I knew was that I wanted something cheap. I didn't know the differences between shared hosting or dedicated servers or the difference between Windows hosting and Linux.

Like many, I started off simple with a personal website (which was a much earlier version of this site) and I've tried several different kinds of hosting and hosting companies. There had been much trial and error for sure. Some web hosting firms were just plain bad others were good but I've been with my company now for a few years and I'm getting precisely what I need and want. I've had shared hosting, dedicated, VPS, and I'm currently using cloud hosting via the Rackspace Cloud at Orracle Hosting (my business) and I couldn't be happier.

What's Website Hosting?

Hosting is something every blogger and website owner has to face. At its most basic website hosting is where your internet site files are stored so others can view your site. When I got started with my website I didn't know much, 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 precisely what I required with the performance I wanted all at a fair price.

The thrill of getting your new website up can quickly be overcome with confusion as you look at all of the options but a solid website host is essential to the success of your site and you need to pick a good one.

So what are all these different hosting options? What are the advantages of one sort of hosting over another? This post covers the different kinds of web-hosting service what's best about each one and where you might run in to issues.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most elementary and least expensive of site hosting options and it's usually the kind of service you hear about when you're are asking others about hosting. A shared hosting plan means there are many sites hosted together on a single server. This also means that your website can be on the same server with up to several hundred other sites. Shared hosting accounts have a prescribed amount of drive space and bandwidth but all sites on the server are pulling from the same pool and often this can cause performance issues.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is more recent development in the world of website hosting. Cloud hosting gives you lots of the performance advantages of VPS Virtual Private Server (more on that below) and dedicated server-type performance but it's much more reasonable when it comes to price. The most important benefit to cloud hosting is its scalability. Your website is hosted on a network of connected PCs and your site has its own cluster on that network.

Performance is stellar due to your site's access to multiple networked servers thus overcoming performance issues that are widespread in multi-user hosting environments. Traffic issues on one site won't negatively affect your site as the system simply scales to meet the increased demands. While you don't have the fine-grained control of your hosting environment as you would with VPS and dedicated hosting you have great flexibility and serious performance available to you.

Virtual Private Server

For sites that require more control and absolutely must have solid consistent performance VPS hosting can be a good choice. VPS hosting means that you have got your own virtual private server which has just one site on it - yours. All of 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 a few completely different virtual machines that are configured to perform as a stand-alone machine and run one website. You get a lot of control with a VPS plan so knowing what you are doing with a server is critical if your plan isn't a professionally managed plan.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Servers are the top of the line. Some sites have one, some have thousands (think Amazon, Facebook for example). A dedicated server is precisely what it sounds like - an entire server dedicated to running your website.

As with the VPS server all of the computer's resources are dedicated to powering your website. Dedicated servers are sometimes utilized by companies and smaller firms that need a lot of horse-power and control of their hosting environment. They're as secure as their owners decide to make them to be and frequently use hardware - not software - firewalls and other security hardware to keep their servers secure. Dedicated servers are the ultimate in control and power and also are expertly controlled by groups of computer geeks who's life aspiration is to maximize server performance. It doesn't actually get much better than this but you are going to pay for it.

See it is not so bad. It's possible to get truly fine quality hosting at a reasonable cost. Things are going to come down to what you want as far as the technology is concerned how well the service is supported by the hosting company THEN you can stress about the cost.

image by Russ Garrett