Web hosting is a fascinating field and certainly not as difficult as many people perceive it to be. Web hosting allows you the opportunity to host your own website on a server with varying degrees of flexibility. There are different types of hosting that allow owners of websites to obtain different types of services according to their budget and security needs. A good beginner’s guide on web hosting will help you get started on hosting your own website. This article explains all the main types of web hosting and the special features they offer. In addition, we also discuss the differences between each type of hosting.
Free Hosting
This is the simplest type of hosting as it involves the least amount of expenditure and is very simple to employ. In free hosting your website is supported by a free hosting environment. This is the major difference between this and other types of hosting. You also get the opportunity to get a free sub domain so you can name your website in the form your name. HostingService.com. While this means that you do not have to pay anything to put up your website on the Web, it also involves some problems which affect the quality of service. With free hosting, the main difference is that connections are slow as a result of which you can experience a lot of downtime.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a paid type of hosting which also allows you to share the costs of hosting by sharing the server with another website owner. In this way, you get better hosting service than free hosting but the financial burden is not too much. What you actually share in shared hosting is the server hardware and the server applications. One problem you may experience with this type of hosting is that due to shared server space, traffic on the server can become huge and as a result, data transmission tends to be slower.
Dedicated Hosting
In this type of hosting you get the luxury of having an entire server dedicated to host your website only. You do not have to share the server space and thus compromise the quality of your service with any other website. However, you need to be sure that the volume of activity your website generates is sufficient to justify the high cost of dedicated hosting. The major difference apart from cost is that dedicated hosting offers greater security and greater access to server resources than other types of hosting discussed in the above sections.
Collocated Hosting
Collocated hosting has the major difference in that it gives you maximum control over the server of your website. In this type of hosting you do not simply use the server of the host; in fact, you purchase and own your very own server. However, you place the server with a web host because the host has specialized facilities to take proper care of your server. However, the host does not interfere with how you use the server. The installation of any software or applications on the server is entirely your decision and you control the server in every way.
Leave a Reply