Web Hosting Guides & Options for Beginners
Understanding distinctions among Web hosting options and the pros and cons of each will help you pare down the list to something considerably more manageable, ensuring that you make the best decision.
Some companies choose to host their own site on their own managed servers, while others contract with a web hosting company with dedicated server hosting or purchase services through an ISP (Internet service provider). While cost and flexibility are often the two primary considerations when choosing how to host a website. understanding distinctions among web hosting options and the pros and cons of each will help you pare down the list to something considerably more manageable, ensuring that you make the best decision.
Hosting your own site may be a viable option for business company with a dedicated IT staff and data center capable of managing the company web site and associated servers. Hosting can be categorized broadly into personal, small to mid-size business web hosting, and large-scale hosting. Within these focused client areas are a myriad of vendor choices, each with several hosting plans from which to choose. For high-volume sites such as Amazon or eBay, downtime can result in a loss of thousands of dollars and potentially millions if occurring during peak hours. For sites that operate 24/7, 365 days a year, site uptime availability of 99.9 percent means downtimes totaling 9 hours for the year. The greater uptime required, the greater the cost of both hardware and staffing to support. The 100% uptime required availability generally requires redundancy at every level: Internet connection, internal connectivity, Web servers, database servers, and operations centers. While uptime is very important for your hosting, company most often choose to purchase a hosting service due to the cost of hosting it themselves.
Choosing a hosting plan purchased from an outside vendor is like choosing residential housing. Hosting plans can be categorized broadly into two types: shared server hosting and dedicated server hosting. Small to medium-sized businesses typically choose a shared server plan where multiple Web sites are hosted on space within a single server.
A shared server plan is generally cheaper than a dedicated one since hosting vendors are dividing the use of large-scale systems with shared flexibly across many organizations, enabling them to keep costs relatively low per customer. While cost is certainly an advantage when choosing a shared server plan, there are some potential drawbacks. Your site may take a slow performance and downtime if your neighbor’s site has a peak traffic on the same server. In addition, it has less flexibility of sharing hosting for you to load your own software or request special configurations.
Dedicated hosting is an option for mid to large-sized businesses that require or desire the flexibility that comes with dedicated servers. Dedicated server hosting usually provides a higher level of security, support, and maintenance with a guaranteed level of availability. Depending on the vendor’s plan, you can write and run your own custom scripts or applications and even use a content management system to manage the site but not worry about managing the network, server hardware, or operating system.
There are so many hosting vendors you can choose form the Internet. A winning approach includes developing your list of requirements along with a plan for current and future growth to allow you to substantially clarify how your needs map out against your hosting options.
If you plan to develop web pages using ASP, PHP, Perl, or Cold Fusion MX, the hosting vendor which is Windows, Unix, or Linux operating system for its servers will need to provide the appropriate software, code modules, and libraries. Vendors try to make choosing plans as easy as possible by packaging mostrequested services together into specific hosting plans so that you are more easily select what you need. For example, an e-commerce hosting package can packed with storefront, shopping cart, and transaction capabilities supporting online payment.
Do you like this post?
Subscribe free via RSS, or by Email to get updates.
