If you are a business owner, you would want your website to help you generate the traffic and eventually the income that you need. Aside from search engine optimization, there are other things that you need to consider for your website. One of these is hosting. But what is hosting and what are its different types? Well, hosting simply refers to the use of a server that provides your website space in the internet. The servers are connected to the internet so that when your customers would want to find you online, they can download your pages and browse through your products and services.
There are different types of hosting and the more common ones are shared hosting, virtual private server and dedicated server. These three have their own advantages and disadvantages. For this article, I will not discuss shared hosting as it is clearly at a disadvantage compared to the other two. So, I will summarize what shared hosting offers clients in one sentence: disk space, CPU time and memory that are shared with all accounts in the server, which cannot accommodate high traffic volume, hence resulting into site crashes.
If you have a growing business then, this means that you need more than shared hosting. The viable choices you have are the other two. But which one is a better option for you? To learn about it, let me run down some facts for you:
Dedicated Server Hosting
– Screams Mine! Mine! All Mine!
The keyword here is “dedicated” which means that you have complete control over the server because it solely exists for your website and your purpose. You can configure the system, regulate it and tweak it to your satisfaction. You can do anything, including customizing your software to fit what your website needs, because you have full access to the server. Hence, in terms of web hosting power and speed, dedicated server hosting is the man!
But wait, before you go dancing around in your underwear – you got to be more aware of its downside too. The idea that a dedicated server is all yours also applies to everything else that comes with the package. Technically then, you need to do all updates and debugging work on your own. Not only that, you do not have other people to share with the costs of the upkeep and maintenance of the system. Thus when the topic is taken in the context of cost-effectiveness, dedicated server hosting can be considered as having a low score. Still, there are providers of this type of hosting who do offer the system at reasonable prices.
Virtual Private Server
– Shouts Mine but Not All the Time!
By now you probably understand that Dedicated Server is the extreme opposite of shared hosting. Somewhere between them is a hosting type called VPS, or Virtual Private Server, which I personally refer to as the “average performance” hosting. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a negative attitude towards VPS. In fact, I consider it as a pragmatic negotiation between Shared Hosting and Dedicated Server. It’s not as costly as Dedicated Servers but not as least performing as Shared Hosting. With VPS, users share the same server but a certain space in the server is always allocated to each user hence each user has sufficient bandwidth. Each user also has adequate capacity to customize the processes he wants to run.
When it comes to cost, VPS is less expensive compared to Dedicated Servers because similar to Shared Hosting, there are also other VPS users in one server – but the number is usually smaller compared to what is present in Shared Hosting. Thus, expenses are also divided among the users. Likewise, there is no need to worry about security breaches because if something goes wrong with the computers of other users and their websites would crash, there is little possibility that this would affect your website.
Of course there are other hosting types out there that you could use as a business owner. But I delved into more details about these two because they are the ones that are more popular among businesses. Still, when your business gets bigger, you’ll have to consider other options too.