Understanding The Different Types Of Web Hosting Packages
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Amy Armitage March 25, 2009
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Amy Armitage |
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages (www.lunarpages.com). Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from dedicated servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. |
Amy Armitage
has written 4 articles for DomainInformer. |
View all articles by Amy Armitage... |
The reason we have a usable Internet at all is because there are
companies called hosting providers that give websites their virtual
"homes" in cyberspace. There are many kinds of hosting services and
solutions, with enough flexibility among them for webmasters to
customize approaches for their specific needs. Despite this wide range
of capabilities, however, hosting providers still offer three common
package types - shared hosting, virtual hosting and dedicated hosting -
although today leading hosting firms will also offer more personalized
packages, often referred to as managed and semi-managed plans.
Understanding the differences among these approaches is just as
important as comparing security, service, expertise and cost among the
various providers you will consider. Understanding the different types
of web hosting packages, in fact, can help you narrow the field of
companies from which you will eventually pick a winner. This article
will educate you sufficiently (although more study is always better
than less) to choose the right hosting package, and perhaps even the
right company to implement it for you.
Shared hosting
Companies and individuals making their first foray into the World
Wide Web often sign up for the least expensive groups of plans, which
would be under the "shared hosting" category. As the name clearly
indicates, your website will be "sharing" disk space on a server with
20 or 200 other sites. Part of your agreement includes a commitment to
stay within a certain, prescribed percentage of the server's CPU
(Central Processing Unit) usage. For family sites, small companies and
other limited "rollouts," this is usually not a problem.
In fact, shared hosting schemes were originally designed around
certain assumptions about site owners’ behavior, many of which turned
out to be right on the money. One of the many assumptions that has
since become fact is that customers simply do not use all the bandwidth
(storage) that they've been allotted in their paid plan. The fact is,
many people and firms run small websites whose traffic volume only
requires a small fraction of that bandwidth. Every so often, a small
site will experience a sudden surge of traffic and data transfers,
pushing the website use over the set limit. You will want to plan ahead
for this kind of eventuality, as most agreement will give your hosting
provider the right to "freeze or seize" the website, at least
temporarily.
Virtual private hosting
As opposed to the shared hosting plans, a Virtual Private Server
(VPS) will set you up with a Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). You will
still share server space with other sites, but will have your own
environment, or partition, on that server. Individual servers are often
divided into multiple, discrete (separate) partitions that run their
own OS (Operating System) and can be booted up individually. These can
be very important features for many firms. Of course, you will still
share space on a single physical server, be restricted to a certain
proportion of the CPU usage and have a limited amount of disk space and
bandwidth because of the other VPS users.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting is a specialized service that offers the customer
such important benefits such as secure, high-quality infrastructure and
high-speed connectivity. These costlier hosting packages can be
tailored to the unique needs of a customer for bandwidth, storage space
and memory, and "renting" an entire server that you do not have to
share enables you to run CPU-intensive programs. Your website
performance will neither affect other sites nor be disrupted by what
others do.
This type of dedicated hosting plan truly is the ideal one for
companies with large, complex, media-rich and/or high-traffic sites.
The "discrete server" model provides them complete control over the
structure, contents and operations of the hosting environment. Not
every individual or company needs dedicated hosting, but the ones that
do could not make it with lesser hosting packages. Past a certain point
of bandwidth, there is no reason to have any other kind of hosting plan.
Managed hosting services
Larger and busier firms often need a more advanced kind of dedicated
hosting plan, one that can give them additional technical support and
state-of-the-art equipment. These plans will also customize services in
such a way as to transfer many important responsibilities to the
hosting company. However, IT expertise is still required by the
customer, who retains control of the operating system(s), applications
and hosting environment. Managed hosting also involves a rather more
significant investment of time, effort, expertise, finances and human
resources than other hosting plans.
If you opt for managed hosting, you would typically lease dedicated,
pre-configured equipment and connectivity from a provider. As the owner
of the data center, the provider will maintain the server, the network
and any other devices, and is responsible for deploying, monitoring,
managing and maintaining the hardware. With contractually defined,
shared responsibilities, managed hosting far exceeds basic dedicated
hosting in levels of performance, security, scalability and up-time.
Semi-managed and reseller hosting
Another name for semi-managed hosting is root server hosting, a kind
of dedicated hosting that lets you control the server through access to
the root. This approach produces a variety of benefits, such as
improved security, more reliable infrastructure and more proactive
hardware maintenance. As it is a semi-managed hosting plan, a hosting
provider will maintain and manage the installation and the hardware,
while you (the client) will manage the other aspects (backups, software
upgrades, etc.). With root access and administrator status, you can do
virtually anything on your assigned server.
Reseller hosting is a way for businesses to host sites on behalf of
their own customers. If you are reselling hosting services it means
that you are making a contract with a hosting provider to sell their
services under your own name or brand. There is ample incentive for web
hosting firms to do this as it enables them to sell more dedicated
hosting space. There are as many different contracts, agreements and
ways of doing this as there are hosting companies, and it is certainly
not something to be undertaken without planning. However, for some
companies it is a powerful addition to the business plan.
The right plan for you
Depending on your needs, you may choose any of the foregoing hosting
plans. Or, as many companies do, you may start small and grow into the
costlier but more powerful packages. When you know how the hosting
plans work, you can do a better job comparing services and costs when
you are ready to set up (or expand) your site. |