When it comes to all of the websites as well as blogs which are on the internet, they start with hosting. Hosting is one of the main variables where anyone can get lost, and even developers who have prior knowledge can get confused. In this article, we will delve into details and explain the different types of hosting options which are present. But first, let’s know what web hosting is?
When you view a website in any browser, you are receiving a code which is written in various coding languages. The browser converts this particular code into understandable things such as images, text columns, buttons etc. The code for any website is held in many different files. Everyone’s used files can be created, modified and even deleted. The files also require a place to live. When it comes to the computer, it is on your hard drive. Your computer has a processor which deals with the different file operations such as editing, deleting, copying etc.
This is exactly what a server actually is. It is essentially a computer which holds different files and is quite capable of operating and performing various tasks on them. It has its own CPU along with memory, hard drive and various other components. It also has an operating system which is generally a Linux-based one.
The host is the company which owns the server where your content is on. In addition to providing you with the hardware for the website, a host also provides few other services such as server management, malware scanning, support, backups etc.
Different types of web hosting
Many of the people get confused with host and hosting package. They are sometimes used interchangeably. Most hosts provide multiple packages which are quite different. For instance, GoDaddy provides four hosting types.
The easiest and best way to get started with hosting is to figure out what kind of hosting you require and then look at various companies and what their offerings are for your hosting requirements.
There are four categories: Shared, VPS as well as Dedicated along with Cloud.
Let’s get into details of these hosting options which are currently available on the web.
When it comes to budget option, shared hosting is the best one. It is quite cheap and also not that good. To understand it, you should remember that how a server is actually a computer with different resources like hard drive space along with RAM, CPU speed etc.? In case of shared hosting environment, the host actually puts a significant number of users on one single server. By significant number, we mean over thousands of users. Each user may have different websites so that means a single server can house between many thousands of websites. If one website has a faulty code, then it can consume a lot of RAM which leaves the other websites with a little portion of total RAM. This leads to other websites going down or getting slow.
However, shared hosting is a great option in case you have a very tight budget. Shared hosting allows different businesses to create their own web presence in countries where it would be impossible. As such shared hosting is quite an important tool for equality on the web.
VPS is an abbreviation for Virtual Private Server, and it is considered to be the most popular and suggested service to upgrade to, and it can also be the most-balanced hosting option.
A VPS server is essentially a shared environment, but the way it is actually shared is quite different. The first thing is that a VPS server is generally limited to 10 to 20 users. This decreases the stress on the server, but the real improvement is due to the hypervisor
A VPS server is essentially split into different parts as there are users. In case there are 10 users, 200 GB of hard drive space and 10 GB of RAM on the server, then each user will be allowed to expand to 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of space. Once the RAM limit is hit, the website may go down while the other remains stable. The hypervisor is the thing which is responsible for managing the virtual machines which create this particular separation within the server.
Another major benefit of VPS servers is that they are quite highly configurable which provides a lot of flexibility. On shared hosts, one can’t really modify the environment as one has to keep changing everyone else’s also. Since the account is present within a virtual machine, one can make a lot of changes without affecting any of the others.
Lastly, a VPS server is scalable. As one is running a virtual machine that takes some percentage of resources which are available to the server as a whole, then the amount of resources the one is allowed to use, can easily be increased in seconds. It is great for business owners who expect their websites to grow and expand.
This is actually the hosting service which negates all of the bad neighbour issues because you are only one on the server. This offers a lot of benefits, but it does come with some downsides.
Since you are provided with a computer all on your own, a lot of companies provide you to customize it extensively. You can easily choose the amount as well as the type of memory along with the operating system to install along with the other hardware components that constitute a computer. This provides you with a lot of flexibility which you may require for some specialized software.
The downside is that you need to know a lot about computers as well as the server technology. While there are many dedicated hosting solutions available, you still require to do a lot more by yourself.
However, it does provide greater flexibility and with it comes to a great control. You can easily run a lot of applications in a streamlined fashion. You can also run a plethora of tools which serve only one purpose, i.e., making your website even faster.
Cloud hosting is actually similar to VPS hosting. A small section of companies doesn’t even call their service as VPS anymore and term them as Cloud or Cloud VPS. The Cloud-based hosting provides you to use the resources of different servers in a network. This also makes it much more scalable along with providing a lot of additional benefits, mainly based regarding security.
A traditional VPS can be easily scaled, but only to a certain point, which is the maximum capacity of the hardware that it is on. However, the cloud-based system can easily be scaled a lot further.
Cloud-based systems do have a much higher probability of protecting the user against DDoS attacks. Even though DDoS attacks aren’t a security risk as their only aim is to overwhelm the website with requests which lead to crashing of the server. The best method of protecting against any such attack like this is blocking as many requests as you can and spread the rest with a very large network, which can easily be done on the cloud-based system.
Cloud systems are quite great in case you wish to scale your website a lot more than the traditional systems. Having said that, at this particular point, it doesn’t make any huge difference to a lot of people going to buy for VPS. A lot of companies are now switching to cloud-based systems in order to replace their regular VPS systems just because of the different benefits the cloud system offer them. This makes cloud-based systems a preferred choice for a lot of companies.