If you happen to own a website or you have a store online then you must have a hosting plan of some sort. It is important that one is able to learn about the various host options that there are especially if your business is growing. This will help you run your business much faster and smoother.
Once your website is ready to go live, you need to find a server on which to host it. Regardless of whether your website is a static corporate brochure or a dynamic ecommerce site you will need to select one of many options open today. It is best to arm yourself with some knowledge in this area, so that your project gets off to a smooth start and keeps running effectively. Luckily, there are many different types of server hosting offered on the internet today. In fact you are spoilt for choice.
There may be no such thing as a free lunch in the world of business, but believe it or not there is such a thing as free web hosts. Many companies offer this facility to new and small ventures to host their start up website or blogs. This is a good place for beginners to get started since there are no costs involved but not for those who are in it for the business.
Although you do not pay, you will soon realize that you are losing in some areas. Free hosts can never give you the kind of facilities you need to help you grow quickly. The cost of bandwidth is not cheap and this would make it impossible for anyone to give substantial band width away for free. Most of the hosts therefore only offer it as a way to advertise their paid plans.
Next comes the option of sharing facilities. This would suit a new business and suffice its needs so long as it remains medium sized. Since costs are shared with other users it is not too expensive and yet there is room to grow. You can also get your own domain name and conduct transactions on the host.
Does this work? As such the space allocated to you is exclusively yours and there is no mix up. In fact you all live together on the host like a big happy family and help each other out from time to time. Best of all you can avail of customer support which is bound to be better than if you were hosting your own site. So what is the down side? When you share you may be compromising on security. You may also not be able to optimize on traffic.
Thirdly you have the virtual private hosts type of servers. By paying a little extra you get better security even though you are still sharing host space with others.
Finally, on the top of the pyramid is the option of going in for dedicated server hosts. Naturally you pay the most for this. But you cannot get exclusive use without paying a premium. All large organizations and companies would insist on dedicated server hosting.
Of course, there are still other variants such as virtual hosting, managed hosting and seas hosting. But for now, the main ones described above will suffice to act as a basic guide to help you decide the right type of server hosting for you.