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Affordable Web Hosting - The Different Types of Web Hosting

by Nick Halmond

Theres a lot of work involved in building your own site and there are a lot of different steps to the process of taking your site from an idea to a living, breathing website. You have to build each of your pages and link them together, testing your site offline as you go. Once your site is fully functional and ready to go, youll have to get hosting for your new website. There are plenty of free webhosts out there and while these are a good way to get started if youve never had a site before, theyre not a permanent solution. If your website is for a business or you just want to reach a large audience, youll need to use paid web hosting instead.

However, paid hosting doesnt mean expensive hosting. There are affordable web hosting solutions to choose from which can work with any budget. Before you choose an affordable web hosting plan, educate yourself about the different types of web hosting you can choose from to make sure that you choose hosting that offers the services your site needs and gives your new site room to grow.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most affordable web hosting solution that is offered by web services around the web. If you are looking to start a fully-functional website quickly, this is the best choice to go with as these affordable web hosting packages have tons of useful features including plenty of disk space for multimedia to be used as web elements as well as adequate bandwidth for handling lots of traffic. Most of the affordable web hosts support PHP, MySQL, and other web technologies needed to make interactive and dynamic websites. Some web hosting providers may offer multiple shared hosting packages that can suit the needs of a larger majority.

Shared hosting (also called mass hosting or virtual hosting) is exactly what it sounds like; your website is hosted on a server which also hosts other websites. This makes these websites easier (and less costly) for the webhost to maintain. However, there is a trade off in that the servers resources are split among the different sites hosted on the server. If your website is relatively small and doesnt have a massive amount of traffic, this shouldnt be a problem and shared hosting is a good affordable web hosting choice for your site as you get started.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting significantly costs more than shared hosting, but differs on how the server resources are used. This type of web hosting allows you to rent an entire server for your own personal use. There are no other websites hosted in these types of servers so you can add all of your major sites and control more server options. Major benefits include better website security and greater speeds even during heavy traffic periods. This type of web hosting is recommended for people maintaining large corporate websites or community sites that have plenty of multimedia content intended for a large audience.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting allows you to purchase web hosting services at a discount and then resell this service under your own branding to others. You may or may not choose to host your own site on this server. Reseller hosting plans vary depending on the webhosting company, so youll want to look into the details of each company youre interested in.

Once youve made your decision on a webhost, compare the plans they offer. Youll usually stay with the same webhost for at least a few years (since there are usually discounts for signing on for a longer time), so youll want to choose well. If your site outgrows your hosting plan, you can simply upgrade your hosting package to give your site more room to grow.

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