While most of you know what a web hosting service is on the surface, it can be really confusing when you have to actually purchase one yourself. The reason being that web hosting itself is of a very general term that can be broken down to many different classes of service depending on your needs. Some hosting caters to simple static web pages, others cater to more dynamic sites such as a web forum. Others still cater to secure sites such as an e-commerce site that needs added security to communicate credit card numbers. At the other extreme end, there would be extremely complex setups for running a social network site, or even a search engine such as Google.
Cost of hosting varies based on the setup complexity of the type of infrastructure you need and also for the amount of server hardware needs, such as storage space, processor speed, amount of memory and other equipment such as network switches, load balancers for a clustered database systems, amount of usable bandwidth, etc.
Having said all that, the type of hosting that most end users would need will fall within a few categories only. The more advanced setups that medium to larger companies require for their huge business growth will most likely be a need to only those businesses, because you could not achieve the need for that sort of complex setup by operating alone. The few varieties that you might choose from would be Shared Hosting, E-Commerce Hosting, VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated Server.
Shared Hosting refers to a server that’s divided into many user accounts, where the resources of the server is shared among all users of the system. Each user is allocated certain amount of disk space, processing memory, CPU cycles, bandwidth and with their own domain name, email accounts, ftp accounts, etc. This type of hosting is relatively cheap and would solve the need of 70% of the websites out there. They’re very affordable, easy to manage, and can easily host any blog site or web forum that caters to a hundred thousand unique visitors a day, something that most websites are not even close to achieving.
E-Commerce Hosting commonly refers to Shared Hosting with Secure Sockets Layer, a method to transmit and receive encrypted web pages. This is required to ensure that the customer’s credit card details do not get intercepted by a hacker while communicating with your web server. Unless you’re running an online store or a web application that requires exceptional security, E-Commerce hosting is not generally used for normal websites, due to the intensive server resources required to encrypt the web page contents.
VPS Hosting, or Virtual Private Server is a method of running multiple ‘guests operating systems’ within the ‘host operating system’. Hence, a server running on the Linux operating system has a small number of other virtual operating systems running within its own memory space concurrently on the host operating system. These ‘guest operating systems’ are self contained in itself and any damage caused to a guest operating system does not affect other guest operating system, or the host operating system.
VPS is different from Shared Hosting whereby in Shared Hosting, a single instance of the web server runs within the host operating system (which is also the only operating system running), and this web server serves different websites under its own folder separation scheme. In contrast, the VPS does not just virtualize the websites hosted under it like a web server software does, but instead virtualizes the entire operating system. This means that each user account runs under its own virtual operating system (the guest operating system), whereby each guest operating system has its own web server software running, email server, space allocation, etc.
A VPS is akin to turning on multiple virtual computers within the main computer. Imagine your Windows operating system loading 10 other copies of Windows within itself, each in its own isolated space from the rest. VPS offers a lot more flexibility and security compared to Shared Hosting, as the account owner can have full control over a less powerful virtual system, instead of having to pay for a full dedicated server hardware that will not be fully utilized.
Lastly, if your website has grown to a size that requires the full resource of a dedicated server, then I must congratulate you, as this would infer that your business has grown to a successful level. A dedicated server hosting would mean that you are now leasing an entire server for your use only. It is a full fledge server that is not shared with any other user. This hosting choice provides the highest flexibility in terms of hardware choice, operating system choice and also the highest level of security compared to the others. As it is physically isolated from all other user accounts, the chances of your system getting hacked into is reduced significantly, but not entirely. A dedicated server will give you full control of any software that you would like installed and configured to your liking. It is also the most expensive of the lot and a mid level dedicated server can easily serve a million users daily without problems. There may be times when you might come across the term ‘Semi-Dedicated Server’, and what this simply means is that it’s a dedicated server shared by two account holders only. It’s the same as a shared hosting for just two accounts, as opposed to hundreds of accounts.
Now that I’ve cleared the basic Jargon involved in the selection of a web hosting package, my next article will focus on the software jargon instead. Until then, good luck with your web hosting selection.