There are many hosting companies that will offer to take care of your technology requirements and you can pretty much pick and choose how much support you require from such businesses depending on how much you want to spend, your own knowledge or experience and how much control you want to have over the hosting. Of course, the expense is a key driver in any decision around your web hosting solution and you may opt to go for one of the free web hosting options that are available. What you should be mindful of, however, is that free web hosting can leave you in a position where you are at the mercy of the supplier. For example, if sites have downtime, or they decide to add cost further down the line. There are a number of different types of web hosts and depending on the size of your business and your business priorities, you can choose the most relevant type of web host.
Types of Web Hosting Services
Free Hosting
There are a number of hosts that advertise as being free, including popular CMS Wordpress. Usually, there are some drawbacks to this, such as the host may use your website to display banner ads and also that you don’t have any control over the service, so the host may remove the service at some point.
Shared Hosting
This is generally the more popular out of the hosts for people first set up. It basically means that you share some server space with other people’s sites. You can usually set this up with relatively low costs as the web host generates their fees by allowing multiple users to use their server. Again, there will be some negatives associated with this approach including the need to upgrade your account as your site increases in size.
VPS Hosting
VPS is a Virtual Private Server whereby you share the server with other users but a single server is portioned so, in essence, it is similar to having your own dedicated server. The difference from a dedicated server is that as multiple VPSs will be sharing hardware the performance may be affected. IBM provides an in-depth explanation of Virtual Hosting.
Dedicated Server Hosting
This option means that the web host provides you with a physical server, giving you full control over the server and selecting the operating system. This option is generally used for larger, more established websites with large amounts of traffic.
Managed Hosting
Due to the large usage of Wordpress, some web hosts offer a managed Wordpress hosting service. They basically take care of everything for you in terms of SEO, security, and backups and provide expertise in all elements of running your website.
