Hosting Packages – Which Solutions is Right For You?

Hosting Packages – Which Solutions is Right For You?

If you have ever experienced seeking out a new web hosting company, you’ll know that when it comes to choice, there is a lot of it. Web hosting is big business, there are thousands of companies all over the world all competing for your business. That in itself makes choosing the right company a challenge. When you couple that with all of the various plans and packages web hosting companies offer you, the task becomes significantly more daunting. Throughout this article we’re going to explain some of the common web hosting types and packages available to the average Webmaster along with a brief explanation of the positives and negatives associated with each.

Shared Hosting

First and foremost, we must address shared hosting, this is the most popular of all of the hosting types out there as it’s the one best suited for single website hosted and as a result of that it’s often the cheapest. Most web hosts offer a wide range of shared web hosting packages which enable the Webmaster to host one single site or up to 5. As the name suggests, shared hosting means that your hosting is shared with us. This doesn’t mean that other people will have access to your files and folders, it just means that the server (computer) that is serving your website will also serve other peoples at the same time. This for the most part is fine as the average web server is designed to serve thousands of requests per minute but it is resource limited. If you have a particularly large site with lots of visitors you may find that the resources available to you are not particularly adequate. On top of that you may find someone else who is hosted on the same server will be running a resource intensive website and through no fault of your own you may find that your own website suffers as a result.

Reseller Hosting

This form of hosting would suggest that it is intended for people to resell hosting services to their own clients such as a web designer who wishes to charge their design clients for hosting. But this is not always the case. Reseller hosting can also be used by the individual who simply want to host more sites on their account than the 1 to 5 fixed limit options often associated with shared hosting. Reseller hosting accounts typically come with a control panel such as Web Host Manager (WHM) that allows the user to create individual hosting accounts from a single central control panel and administer each and every site on the platform directly. Reseller hosting accounts are often found on shared servers just like shared hosting but you will also find them on VPS solutions (virtual private servers) or even cloud based platforms. We will discuss the VPS below.

VPS (Virtual Private Servers)

The VPS or virtual private server is a server solution in which your resources are your own (as the name suggests). This might seem vague to someone who is not in the know but it basically means whatever resources your account has been allocated (CPU/Memory/Bandwidth/Disk Space etc) are not affected by other accounts on the same server. As with shared hosting, if someone is using a lot of resources, your site will suffer. You will not have this problem with a VPS as your resources are your own. The virtual element comes into play as it is all software controlled. You do not have physical hardware allocated, it’s virtual but if setup correctly and the resources of the server balanced you will not run into issues. The added benefits of a VPS as well (as significantly more resources) is the ability to control every part of your environment. With shared and reseller, you’re limited as to what you can do with your server – usually just adding/managing accounts. With a VPS with command line access you can control a lot more.

There are more hosting options out there such as a cloud solution or even a dedicated server but they’re usually reserved for higher end sites and may be slightly overkill for the average webmaster.