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Selecting The Proper Type of Web Hosting

by Max Peykar

When you are launching your website on the internet, an important issue that has to be taken care of is the kind of web hosting service that you will use. The website may have a diverse nature of functions, either as a business website or a personal website. But, they all need to be properly hosted and thus selecting a correct web hosting type becomes vital. Usually there are three types of hosting available with the companies ? free hosting, shared or virtual hosting and dedicated hosting.

Free hosting is the most popular web hosting type among beginners, because it’s the easiest to obtain and maintain. Since beginners are just testing the waters, free hosting can help them learn about building web traffic and other basics to survive in the online world. Family or hobby websites will benefit the most out of free hosting services, because there aren’t many resources to make the site more advanced with time.

With free hosting, you can’t use a domain name of your preference, since this web hosting type is only provided for sub-domains. So, if you like to have the name ?my hobby? for your site, it would be accessible via a long url, similar to ?http://www.freesiteforme.com/myname/myhobby.? Naturally, this type of web address is hard to remember, typos are very likely and shouldn’t be used for any professional purpose.

Shared or virtual hosting is the next option, which is opted for by small and medium scale businesses. This web hosting type is very cost effective and offers some resources that can help with site development, promotion and maintenance. These include databases, email accounts, add-on components, web editing software and more. You can use a preferred domain with shared hosting and technical support is readily available.

Since the website is positioned in a massive and powerful web server with hundreds of other sites sharing it, this web hosting type is aptly named shared hosting. The term virtual hosting also holds the same meaning. The low cost and ease of use are the advantages gained by anyone choosing shared hosting. The drawbacks include some bandwidth restrictions and security limitations, because the server is accessed by thousands of visitors who come to each website hosted on it.

Dedicated hosting is the next web hosting type. This is the most powerful type and is also very secure. It is best suited for large businesses that have huge traffic volumes. In this case, the complete server is in your hand, thereby making it an expensive option. Along with it come the extra maintenance costs of updating it and better web development. With the help of this website, you can host a number of domain names.

Besides these hosting types, there’s an additional web hosting type that hasn’t been considered much as a primary hosting type. This is known as collocated hosting. It’s simply a way of placing your own web server in a specific premises, under the care of a service provider. Similar to running your own server from your home or office, it only differs when it concerns the server’s physical location. A service provider can offer better security and dedicated utilities such as electricity and internet for more effective web hosting. This type of hosting is clearly very expensive and requires a lot of configuring.

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