What is web hosting and types of web hosting ?
Web hosting or internet hosting, is the process of buying or renting space to host a website on the World Wide Web. Content such as HTML, images and CSS of a website are made available to be viewed online. Every website is hosted on a server. A server is a computer that connects web users to your site from anywhere in the world.
As the name implies, service providers for web hosting consist of servers, connectivity and services to host websites. The service providers offer a variety of hosting plans for the purposes of small to large organizations. It is essential to choose the right kind of plan for your website from a plethora of varieties of web hosting services available. Choosing your plan will depend on your budget for hosting and how you are planning to host your website.
Web hosting happens when the files of a website present in some local machine are uploaded on a web server. The resources of the server like RAM, hard drive space and bandwidth are allocated to that particular website. Of course, if there are multiple websites hosted on any one server, there will be a division of resources and how much resources you get will depend upon the type of plan you are choosing for your website hosting.
As the technology of web hosting has progressed, there are different types of web hosting that have been introduced to meet the different needs of customers that suits their needs the best :
- Shared Web Hosting : A server has an abundance of resources and more often than not, a single website doesn’t need as many resources to be hosted on the web. Here comes shares web hosting into picture where a single server’s resources are shared by multiple websites. This is a great option for a majority of websites as sharing the resources makes it comparatively cheaper and its also easy to set up. This type of hosting is best suited for new websites that don’t expect a lot of traffic in the initial days or small to medium businesses. On the other hand, it is not suited for large businesses with lots of traffic due to obvious reasons.
- VPS Hosting : VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, also known as Virtual Dedicated Server. It is when a virtual server acts as a standalone server for each client. The difference between shared web hosting and VPS hosting is that clients can have full access to configure the VPS. This type of hosting is generally used by smaller business that may want the flexibility of having a dedicated server, without incurring the high cost of the server.
- Dedicated Hosting : As the name suggests, dedicated hosting provides the entire servers on rent. Obviously, this type of hosting is expensive when compared to the above two. For this reason, it is only used when there is a lot of traffic expected or when more control over servers is required.
- Cloud Hosting : This is the latest hosting type in the market and it has become very popular in the recent years. Cloud hosting operates across many web servers. It typically offers unmetered and reliable bandwidth and an infinite amount of disk space. This explains why so many large businesses are moving towards cloud.
- Reseller Hosting : This is a type of web hosting where the account owner can use his allocated bandwidth and hard drive space to host websites on the behalf of other businesses. The original host owner is then termed as the reseller in this case. This type of hosting is beneficial when there space purchased is unused and some of it can be shared with another party. It can also become a recurring source of income.