8 Popular Types of Web Hosting Services

 With hundreds and hundreds of web companies competing for your business with thousands of different web hosting plans, things can get pretty confusing pretty quickly. Add to that all of the "technical geek" terms like bandwidth, GB, and DNS and it's easy to see how someone who just wants to start an online business and make money online can get easily discouraged.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting means just that. Your website is hosted on a server shared by other websites. The advantage of this setup is the shared cost. 

The biggest disadvantage of a shared hosting account is that you're at the mercy of the other sites on your server. A really popular site may adversely affect the performance of your site. On the other hand, if you're the most popular site on the server, you get to use a super server for a very low price.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller hosting packages are a shared hosting account with extra tools to help you resell hosting space.

Reseller packages come with greater technical control (often via the Web Host Manager (WHM) control panel), billing software to help you invoice clients, and other extra perks.

Cloud-Based Web Hosting

Cloud-Based Web Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology that lets hundreds of individual servers work together so that it looks like one giant server. The idea is that as the need grows, the hosting company can just add more commodity hardware to make an ever-larger grid or cloud.

The advantage of cloud-based web hosting is that if you get an unusually large amount of website traffic the web hosting plan can accommodate the surge of traffic - rather than shutting your website down.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Virtual private servers share one physical server but act like multiple, separate servers. A VPS hosting is a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your dedicated machine. Even though each VPS instance shares hardware resources, they are allocated a dedicated slice of the computing resources.

Dedicated Web Server

When you have a dedicated server, it means you are renting one physical server from a hosting company. You can have full control (called "root" permissions in Linux) if you want it.

With a dedicated server, you don't have to worry about other websites on a shared server taking up your resources and slowing your website down.

Colocation Web Hosting

When you colocate, you rent rack space from a data center. You bring in your server hardware and they provide power, cooling, physical security, and an internet uplink. This means you're responsible for your server software, data storage, backup procedures, etc. If hardware fails, you're responsible for replacing it and getting the server back up and running.

Self Service Web Hosting

The ultimate hosting plan -- you do it all yourself! You buy the servers, install and configure the software, make sure there are sufficient cooling and power in your machine room, and double up everything for redundancy. Some of the things you'll have to take care of:

Managed WordPress Hosting

With the increasing popularity of WordPress as a web-building platform, many web hosting servers are offering what are referred to as "Managed WordPress Hosting.

In a nutshell, managed WordPress hosting is a service where the web hosting provider will keep your WordPress installation up-to-date which can help protect your site from security threats that would allow hackers into your website.