In today’s market, a business of any size needs a website. Often, it is cheaper to outsource the hosting of that website to a third party rather than trying to do it in house. However, when determining the best hosting solution, price should not be the main factor because businesses have different needs which require different hosting solutions. The best option for you depends on the functionality that your site requires both now and in the future. Here is some information that will help you determine which solution is best for your organization, as well as things to keep in mind as your site evolves.

Before selecting a web hosting package, you must first identify what you need your website to do. The purpose of any website is to incentivize the reader to take some course of action. What course of action do you want them to take? What message do you wish to send? How are you going to send that message? The answers to these questions determine the amount of bandwidth you need, the website availability you require, and the peripheral services you must include (such as video hosting services). Once you know these things, you can then make an educated decision on what web hosting package to purchase.

Types of Web Hosting
Free Hosting has its limits. It is free because the host makes money in some other way—usually by filling your site with exterior advertisements or pushing you to buy more services. You are unlikely to look very legitimate to your customers under a free plan. Additionally, free plans seldom provide enough resources to handle more than a few visitors at a time. Personal blogs often utilize this if they have a small audience and publish occasionally.

Shared Hosting is the most common and cost-effective means to get your website up and running. Shared hosting plans can cost less than $10 per month for enough space and bandwidth to put up a modest eCommerce or informational site. In a shared plan, your site shares space with other websites on the same server. Because of the number of connections to the web each server has, your site can still be accessed by many users simultaneously even though other users are accessing other sites on the same server. Many small eCommerce sites and blogs  utilize shared hosting because its affordable and easy to manage.

Dedicated Hosting enables customers to utilize an entire server without competing for resources. Most web hosts will give you an option between managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting. In unmanaged hosting, you are granted root access to the server and are expected to maintain it yourself. This gives you more control over the server but requires more in-house expertise. In managed hosting, the host retains similar control over the server that they would have under shared hosting. While you will pay more for managed hosting, you will enjoy the benefits of not having to worry about standard server maintenance. Dedicated hosting—whether managed or not—is best when your site experiences a lot of traffic. Large eCommerce sites, high-volume informational sites, or small data streaming sites will all require a dedicated servers for optimal performance.

Cloud Hosting provides many of the same benefits and resources of dedicated hosting without a single point of failure since your site is not relying upon one server. This method is similar to diversifying your stock portfolio. If one of the servers has a problem, your site is still operative. This feature is known as failover or cloud hosting redundancy. Cloud hosting protects you and keeps your costs low ($50 per month, for example). Cloud hosting relies on virtual server technology that can access the resources of multiple servers. Each virtual server is designed to meet the needs of your website. Because of this, cloud hosting gives you more resources and flexibility than are possible with shared hosting. Large eCommerce sites, high-volume informational sites, and data streaming sites are all possible with cloud hosting. In fact, cloud hosted sites are often preferred over dedicated hosting because of the flexibility and fail over capabilities.

The term co-location in web hosting refers to a fully managed datacenter where businesses that own their own hardware can store it. Co-located servers are completely unmanaged by the web host. All the web host provides is security, alternate power sources, and climate control. All other server maintenance is carried out by the company that owns the co-located servers. Read More »