These days you will be spoilt of choice between the different type of web hosting. While having multiple choice is good, it can also been confusing. In this articles we will explain to you the different type of web hosting so that you can make an informed decision when purchasing a web hosting.
Basically there are 4 types of web hosting
Shared Hosting
This is the common hosting available in the market. In shared hosting environment, your website will be hosted in a particular web server together with other websites and customers. This model works as the amount of storage and bandwidth required for your website is just a fraction of what the server can provides. Typically web server will have huge storage and computing power beyond what you needs.
Under shared hosting you will be allocated a certain storage amount and bandwidth. Other customers are unable to see your files and folders, similarly you cannot see their files and folders.
That is where the separation stops. If for example any of the other websites that is on the same web server experiencing high traffic, hence utilising a lot of memory and CPU of the web server, that will slow down the entire web server, your websites will also be experiencing slow response time.
While these limitation can be worrying, if your website has less than a thousand of visitor at a particular time, you should be fine with the shared hosting as what we mentioned, the memory and CPU power of web server are not like your typical computer at home. Most server are powered by Intel Xeon processor with Octa-Core and huge RAM.
Hence Shared Hosting is perfect for a new website owners, small business and individuals.
Cloud Hosting
As the name suggest, cloud hosting does not take place on one physical server. Instead, cloud hosting are connected to a series of server that linked together that made up the cloud. What this means is that, a website that was hosted on cloud server is not dependant to the CPU and computing power of just one server.
If something happen to one of the web server within the cloud server, the rest of server will automatically pick up the slack and your website remains unaffected. This is similar technology used by cloud services such as iCloud, dropbox, Google Drive.
Under cloud hosting you will be allocated a certain storage amount and bandwidth similar to shared hosting. In addition, you are also allocated a certain computing power (i.e. CPU and memory). Cloud hosting also offers flexibility of upgrading your allocated resources (storage, bandwidth, CPU and memory) without the need to move your website to a different server. This is due to the fact that. your website are not belong to any particular server, but rather to a network of server.
Cloud hosting typically cost more as compared to Shared hosting. However, it offers more flexibility where you can scaled up your website resources as needed and support faster load times, even when your website gets a lot of visitors.
Hence Cloud Hosting is perfect for new site owners and business who anticipate huge visitors (typically more than 1,000) at a particular time. E.g. e-commerce website that anticipate huge traffic during the mega sales promotion, etc.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting, which stands for Virtual Private Server, is a step up from shared hosting. While you technically still share a server with other website, the portion of the server resources is partitioned and allocated to you.
Similar to cloud hosting, you will be allocated a certain storage amount, bandwidth and computing power (CPU and memory), however the way it was allocated is different than Cloud Hosting. Technically you are running your own server and you can customise your own server as you want.
VPS hosting are normally for those customers websites that requires storage and computing power beyond shared hosting, but not yet ready to purchase a full blown dedicated server. As you would imagine, VPS hosting will cost more as compared to Shared Hosting and Cloud Hosting given this flexibility.
As the name suggest, since now you are not renting a space for your website, but rather renting a server, what comes with it is server maintenance and configuration. Now you have the option to upgrade your web server to use the latest technology, etc (e.g. PHP 8, new version of mail exchanger, new version of mySQL, etc). A word of caution, unless you sign up for managed VPS Hosting where all the technical aspect of maintaining a web server is done by the VPS provider, you basically on your own. Hence technical knowledge of operating a web server is essential.
Dedicated Server Hosting
This is the ultimate web hosting solutions. Basically you are renting the whole web server for your own use. It is like you are buying a web server (which is basically a super computer) and put it in the Data Centre that is connected to the World Wide Web.
Your limitation is the type of server, storage space and computing power that you purchase. If you are buying an Intel Xeon Octa-core with 64GB RAM with 2TB SSD, the whole storage, bandwidth and computing power are for you. If you want more storage, or memory power, you can purchase them separately.
As with VPS hosting, unless you opt for managed Dedicated Server Hosting, where you basically hire someone to look after your web server for a fee, you have to manage every aspect of your web server including a visit to data centre to manually restart your web server or perform a hard reset. Hence technical knowledge is required.
Our Recommendation
Unless you are very sure about what you want, perhaps start with Shared Hosting. If you web visitor increases, scale up to either Cloud Hosting or VPS Hosting. By that time, you will already familiar with the technical know how about web server and web hosting and will be ready to move to an exclusive Dedicated Server Hosting.
