When considering different web hosting options you will quickly realize that there are many terms you barely understand. It’s not just you.
Unless you’re an expert yourself dealing with websites every day, building them, fixing them or optimizing them you will struggle with geeky language almost from the start.
Indeed already the names of different hosting solutions may be confusing.
Cryptic acronyms and misleading expressions make it unnecessary difficult to understand what’s going on in web hosting. What is
hosting? No idea? Let us help then. It’s not as difficult to grasp as it may sound at first. We’re just human beings as well!
Shared Hosting
Is “shared hosting” really an option for you? It sounds dirt cheap usually but sharing is great, isn’t it?
We’re taught to share in kindergarten and sharing on social media is the most desirable practice both friends and strangers will love you for. Yet
when it comes to hosting websites sharing may not be for you!
Especially in case you mean business when online publishing shared hosting might be disadvantageous. Why? There is a nifty infographic from the people at Hostingfacts that explains it in a manner even people who aren’t into technology can grasp.
You are actually sharing resources with numerous, maybe even thousands of other websites.
What happens when your audience grows and you have lots of visitors at the same time? The hosting package might quickly get overwhelmed. Then the low cost of shared hosting might backfire.
VPS
The next level of hosting is the usually so called Virtual Private Server or VPS. Why is it virtual? It’s not a real “dedicated” server. It’s not a machine (think computers) reserved just for your needs. It’s a separate server software running for your website.
On VPN you still have to share the physical server with a several other hosting clients.
While shared hosting will perfectly suffice for hobbyists and most small businesses, larger business or publishers keen on getting a lot of traffic need a VPS most probably. Yet even VPS might not be enough for some use cases or websites in general.
Cloud
Enterprise – that is corporate – clients rather you need to go a step further and opt for cloud hosting to take advantage of an infrastructure built on numerous servers to handle spikes of popularity.
Just imagine finally going viral and going offline while at it!
This is not the end yet but I won’t go into more details. I don’t want you to suffer from choice overload. Just take a look at the infographic yourself in case you want to choose from even ore options.
For most people starting out knowing and understanding shared, VPS and cloud hosting will be perfectly fine.
Related Post: Some niche companies have also made it big with hosting!
