There are lots of web hosting companies around and many of them offer different hosting plans and packages based on the needs of different types of customers.
Today’s posts give an overview of the hosting plans available. This will help you understand them and eventually decide which one of them is right for you.
Free Hosting
Some web hosting companies offer free hosting plans. This is often ideal for webmasters who just want to build a simple website or blog for fun.
As should be expected, websites built on these free hosting plans have frequent downtime, slow connection speed, and lots of annoying banners that automatically get added to the site and pop up frequently.
And typically, to get this free hosting plan, most web hosting companies require that you buy a domain name from them. Bear this in mind however; with these companies, a lot of them don’t allow you to transfer these free sub-domains to a different web host.
Shared Hosting
This is ideal for small business owners who are not expecting high traffic to their website. With shared web hosting, you and other website owners on the Web Host’s plan get to share a single server, including the physical server and the software applications that come with it.
A major advantage of this is that it is economical, as the overall cost is shared between you and other website owners.
There’s a big advantage though; the resources such as disk space, monthly traffic, email accounts, databases are limited. So bear in mind, if you’re expecting a lot of traffic, disk space, email capabilities, etc, then shared hosting plan is not for you
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting is the ideal solution for you if you’re a large-scale business that is expecting high traffic to your website, require a lot of system resources, and need a higher level of security.
With dedicated web hosting plan, you have an entire web server to yourself. This means you get better and faster website performance, and you won’t be sharing the server’s resources with other website owners.
However, it costs more. This is because you are not sharing the server with anyone else, meaning that you will be responsible for bearing the entire operation cost.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
With VPS hosting, you get to have your own operating system (OS), which means you have all the server applications to yourself and can fully customize them to suit your needs. It is optimal for those who have high traffic to their website or need to set up a server in a specific way.
Technically, it’s both shared and dedicated web hosting. This is because it’s a virtualized server that’s just like a dedicated server, except that you’re within a shared hosting environment.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting allows you to set up multiple individual hosting plans within a single web hosting account. It’s suitable for business owners who are expecting to run several smaller websites.
HostGator is an example of a web hosting company that offers affordable reseller hosting to their clients.
