Sunday, July 20, 2008

Webhosting: Shared, VPS or Dedicated

By Matt Hedges

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.

Some common types of web hosting are mentioned below:

Shared hosting

In simple terms, this is a situation where a solitary server hosts and supports several web pages. This suits fledgling businesses perfectly who are unable to spend large to acquire dedicated servers and therefore does away with other expenses like maintaining a system administrator.

Various maintenance features are provided by the service provider of the shared hosting. These include security updates, server management, anti-virus backup and server software.

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.

A shared web hosting is cheap, no doubt, but it doesn't have the level of security offered by the IP-based web 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 website's 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.

Virtual Private Server

The software of the divides it into many 'virtual machines' though it has a single server like a shared server. Each such VPS gets their own allotted RAM, disc space etc though the server's total resources are still shared by the various websites being hosted. Using the allocated resources, each operates completely independently.

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.

Due to the internal divisions of the system of the VPS, there is more security to a website than what a shared host provides. In a shared host, if someone hacked into the main server, then every site would get affected, which is not so in case of VPS.

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 Web Hosting

Individuals and large businesses who eagerly want to control their websites and the functioning processes of the web host find dedicated hosting facilities simply perfect. As the name suggests, a dedicated server host a single website offering people the benefit of controlling. As the website owner has only to look into the web software related matters, and exercise his freedom, the freedom and control is multiple. The hosting company looks into other issues like data maintenance, security and power supervision.

Dedicated web hosting is the best choice is you need high amount of bandwidth, more disk space and a customized server. Besides, you get to choose the features for the website as well, like the software, settings, operating system and multimedia requirements. It's a good option to consider if you can't manage a private server due to limited expenses.

Your expenses can be saved up to 85% with a dedicated server. You may not have the financial resources and technical know-how to maintain, install and run your own IT staff but have a high traffic to your website. Then, if you can not pay for a network administrator, the programs will run everything smoothly and most of the other functions.

As you know that you are the only one using this server, a dedicated server thus offers 100% assurance and security to you. Downtime problems and security issues are also solved if there are no other sites on the server. Companies feel safer using a managed dedicated host providing additional data security. This is especially true for companies that have client databases and other important information up on their sites.

So while the costs of a shared host are less, they are never very secure and never so easily accessible as dedicated web hosts are. Using the latter might require you to shell out some extra expenses, but given that it gives you a very higher level of safety than a shared server makes the additional expenses worth incurring. For purposes of business growth, a dedicated server is a must!

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