Web hosting has become a much sought after activity in terms of online business, especially after the rapid advancement of Internet services. You have the space to host your personal homepage, or business profile and webpage through a web hosting company. As even your prospective employers might want to look at your personal thoughts or other details from your own web page, using a web hosting company can thus prove very profitable to you. By creating great networks through your business website, you can successfully expand and consolidate your business over the Internet. One must understand the importance of web hosting for all of this to work.

There are a lot of types of web hosting services like free and paid hosting, shared and clustered web hosting, file and dedicated web hosting, etc. So when you select a web host, you have to consider your needs for it.

Following are the three common kinds of web hosting:

Shared hosting

Simply put, a solitary server hosting and supporting several web pages is called shared hosting. Newly started businesses which are unable to spend larges sums of money to acquire dedicated servers suit this type perfectly. As a result, other expenses like maintaining a system administrator are done away with.

In case of shared hosting, various maintenance features like server management, security updates, server software and anti-virus backup are provided by the provider of the shared hosting.

There are primarily two ways of web hosting: the IP address based way and the name based way. The host who with own individual IP address provides each of the sites he hosts with their own SSL certificate in the IP address based way. Consequently, a sense of security is endowed to the websites. Various web hosts are provided with a single address in the name based hosting. Everyone uses this particular IP address.

Using a shared host might come cheap, but it comes without the sense of security that is there in IP based hosting.

The incompatibility with relatively old browsers is one of the many disadvantages of the name based hosting system. A failure to send out requests carrying the host name will occur with a HTTP/1.0 browser without up gradation. Hand name based hosts cannot support HTPPS websites because they share the same digital certificates. It is virtually impossible to access if the Domain Name System (DNS) conks out any website hosted by a name based web host.

CPU, disc space, and your websites Bandwidth being affected or slowed as other sites are using the same server are the problems of a cost effective shared web hosting system. This system also puts certain system level things out of your control like scripts and the system software being used. But you can be comfortable without such features if your website is relatively small. You might want to gain knowledge about Virtual Private Sector or VPs if such things do bother you and you want some control over the things powering your website.

VPS – Virtual Private Server

A VPS like a shared server also has one server only, but the software of the system divides it into several virtual machines. Therefore though the servers total resources are still shared by the various websites being hosted but each such VPS gets their own allotment of RAM, disk space etc and operate completely independently using the allocated resources.

You can do various things as you are granted this much greater freedom when compared to a shared host. These different things range from running a totally different OS to having your own scripts and choice of software, without disturbing the other sites on the server.

The kind of access that you may get to the main server in case of VPS is almost similar to the kind of access that you could get in a dedicated server. The only difference is that installing software and scripts can be done at a much lower cost in the case of VPS.

The sense of security of a VPS system is much greater than a shared hosting service because of the internal division of the former. All sites are at risk a shared hosting service if the main server is hacked into. On the other hand, this is not the case in a VPS system.

The division of the server generally occurs evenly with the total resources being distributed equally among the number of websites that are sharing the server. Therefore if there are 10 websites on a VPS server, everything from the disk space to the RAM is divided by 10, with each website getting 10% of the whole.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting facilities are meant for individuals and big businesses who are eager to take control of not only their websites but also the functioning process of the web host. A dedicated server offers people the benefit of doing that because as the name suggests, in this case a single website is hosted by a single server. The freedom ad control here is manifold, as the website owner has only to look into the web software related matters and can exercise his freedom as far as that is concerned. While other issues like security, power supervision and data maintenance etc are looked after by the hosting company.

If your website requirements are large bandwidth, greater resources like disk space and if you are looking for a high quality, customized server, opting for a dedicated host seems to be the perfect solution. You can then choose a host of features for your website like operating system, settings, software and multi-media necessities. A dedicated hosting service is also the answer to all those who cannot afford to purchase a server of their own, but want similar services.

A dedicated server can save your expenses to the tune of 85%, if there is a lot of traffic o your website, but you are restricted by the technical knowledge and money to have your personalized IT staff.

Security is no longer an issue with dedicated server at the helm of all affairs, since you would be the sole user of a server. Even downtime problems are eliminated because of this unique access to the server. Those companies which need to have a database of clients and such other information on their website feel more secure on a dedicated server.

Though shared web hosts arrive with the heavy burdens of threatening security and accessibility concerns if other sites face heavy traffic at any point, they are nevertheless cheaper. You will have the comfort and knowledge that you are using a thousand time safer server and which cannot be slowed down by traffic of other websites with a slightly costlier dedicated server. Those looking for forward to expand and grow their business will consequently find a dedicated server perfectly suited to their needs.