What Specific Type of Web Hosting Account Do You Need?

You’ve dived into the water seeking a web hosting account and found it teeming with sharks, all eager to get you to take advantage of their latest offer to host your website. This can be truly confusing, as there are many different web hosts out there, with many more type of hosting available to you. How to choose?

First decide what your purposes are and how much you can spend initially. If you are attempting to launch a full-blown ecommerce site with all the attendant bells and whistles, your needs will be a lot more intensive than if you wanted to host a personal blog chronicling your summer vacation or first semester at college!

Web hosting can range anywhere from a few dollars a month to a few hundred; the trick is to know what you need. If you are hosting one site, and do not expect to have massive bandwidth needs, at least at first, then a shared web hosting plan, or even a free web host might meet your needs.

A free hosting platform, such as hosting your blog or site at places like Weebly or Tripod, you’ll be stuck with their limited resources, and sometimes with ads on your site that have nothing to do with you. These types of web hosting accounts are good for personal sites, and anything you aren’t going to be sending a great number of customers to. The reason you wouldn’t want to do that is that you have little control over the web space: if they don’t like your site, or the amount of bandwidth you are using, you are coming down. It’s their sandbox!

A shared web hosting plan means that you share the web space with other sites, and also share the available bandwidth. This is usually the web hosting of choice for small businesses, at least at the start. The problems come when one of the sites you share with hogs bandwidth, which slows your site down, or has a security issue, which can affect all of the other sites on the server. This type of hosting does have several advantages however, two of them being lots of support help, and a great deal of available features. It is also very affordable.

The next step up is a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This means that you have space on a server that is yours and yours alone, and thus avoid many of the aforementioned potential pitfalls. The one major drawback here is that you’ll need to manage the server yourself, and if you’re not a whiz at security updates, installing patches and generally fixing whatever goes wrong, then this is not for you.

If that’s the case, you’d be much better off with a Managed Virtual Private Server. They provide the support, you retain control. You pay for this though, of course.

The top tier of web hosting would be dedicated servers, where you have a server that is you rent from a hosting company, and you have full control over. If you need support, there is the Managed Dedicated Server option. These options are for sites that get a good amount of traffic or expect to, or have scripting needs not commonly available on lower priced plans.

Take a moment before you sign on the virtual dotted line and decide what type of plan most meets your web hosting needs, and then begin shopping for features and price in that particular vein. You’re far more likely to find a plan that fits the bill!