What sort of host are you on?

It’s easy for people with a technical background to forget that some terms may not be clear to others. This morning I was speaking to someone about hosting and well, they were getting confused with some pretty basic terminology. So I pulled up an article called A Sundry of Options for Web Hosting that lists the types of web hosting options available and what they mean. In a nutshell you can have:

  • Free Hosting – At the bottom of the pile you can get hosting that need not cost you a cent. There are usually limitations as to what you can run here though and possibly conditions like advertising on your site. Still, a good way to learn.
  • Shared Hosting – If you want to be independent, shared hosting is the next step up. This is the best options for most website owners though you need to realise that you’re sharing resources with other websites so choose a host with a good reputation.
  • Reseller Hosting – Most hosts now offer this option. This means that you can host multiple sites on your service and even charge for your services. Worth exploring if you have more than one site or want to generate an income from your online activities.
  • Dedicated Hosting – At the top end of the scale, Dedicated Hosting lets you have your own machine with which you are free to do whatever you want. This gives you full control and the best performance, but it also the most expensive of the 4 options.

If you’re interested in website hosting and what options are available, the website I found the article on, Web Hosting Geeks, has reviews and comparisons you might be interested in .. and other articles about hosting too.

2 comments

  1. You missed a very important host type Virtual Private Server hosting, which sits inbetween shared and dedicated. VPS is good, it gives you same freedom as dedicated servers, on a shared host server.

    Regards,
    Saravana

  2. @Saravana: I purposefully didn’t mention VPS, Virtualised Hosts and Virtual Dedicated Servers because in my mind they’re a subset of dedicated hosts. Virtualisation software nowadays can protect each partition so that there’s no cross-talk or performance dependencies between hosts. So, for all intents and purposes, they are running on their own dedicated machine (even though they are cheaper then procuring our own hardware)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.