As technology has progressed, different types of web hosting have been introduced to meet the different needs of websites and customers best. These include:
Shared Web Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
VPS Hosting
Cloud
Reseller
Let's look into the most popular web hosting services in more detail.
Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is when a website is hosted on the same server as many other websites. Most web hosting companies provide shared hosting. It’s cheap and easy to set-up which makes it a good fit for new sites which don’t expect a lot of traffic in the short term. It’s best suited for personal websites as well as those belonging to small and medium-sized businesses.
Anyone serious about digital marketing or running an online business should carefully review their shared hosting options and make sure that your provider can offer services such as Namecheap’s Business SSD hosting, which is designed specifically for e-commerce websites. Shared hosting isn’t suitable for large sites with lots of traffic either. These sites need a dedicated server to accommodate a suitable amount of resources to guarantee decent website performance.
VPS Hosting
Virtual private servers (VPS) also known as virtual dedicated server (VDS), is when a virtual server appears to each client as a dedicated server even though it’s actually serving multiple websites. For this reason, VPS style hosting is considered to be the stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine. The main difference between shared hosting and VPS is that clients have full access to configure the VPS which is much closer to dedicated style hosting.
VPS is often used by smaller websites and organizations that want the flexibility of having a dedicated server, without the high costs implied.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting (sometimes referred to as managed hosting or a dedicated server) provides entire servers to rent. This type of hosting is comparatively expensive when placed side-by-side with shared hosting plans; for this reason, it's only really used when a website has a lot of traffic or when more server control is required.
There is more to dedicated hosting than providing a single website with entire server equipment housed in a data center. It allows greater self-service server administration facilities. This is considered a more flexible arrangement because it allows total control over the server, its software and security systems. At the same time, however, you need to have the technical expertise on-hand to manage the platform yourself.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the latest hosting type to hit the market, and it’s become extremely popular in recent years. This type of hosting operates across many interconnected web servers that supply an affordable, scalable and reliable web infrastructure. Cloud hosting plans typically offer unmetered, reliable bandwidth and an infinite amount of disk space for unlimited domains which explains why so many large businesses are turning to the cloud. It’s an effective method of running a website with resource-intensive applications or a large number of content assets such as images, but it can have a much higher cost.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting is a form of web hosting where the account owner can use his or her allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host a website on behalf of third parties. The original hosting account owner is the ‘reseller’ in this instance. Reseller hosting is beneficial when the amount of space purchased isn’t required, and some of the allocated resources can be shared with another party. Sharing disk space, bandwidth, CPU, etc. while getting a recurring source of income.
Hosting providers offer specific reseller hosting plans to accommodate entrepreneurs interested in this business practice. Buying a reseller hosting plan is also helpful for anyone with multiple domains. You may design your own hosting packages for your websites or clients gives the resources allocated to the reseller hosting account.