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Starting a Website? The Three Types of Hosting You Need to Understand

Web-hostingGetting the technology that supports your website right is important, whether you are starting a blog, an ecommerce site, or a website for your business. Before you can even put your site out there for people to come and visit, you need to arrange hosting, and while this isn’t difficult to do, it can be something of a daunting prospect to a novice, with what look like thousands of different options and providers to choose from.

In actual fact, there are really only three types of hosting you need to understand to be able to navigate this stage of getting your new site online and choose a good option for the site you want to create. These are shared hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated server hosting. Here we take a look at what these terms mean and how each kind of hosting works:

Dedicated Server Hosting

Probably the easiest type of hosting to understand is dedicated server hosting. With this, you pay a monthly or annual fee to a hosting company like FDC dedicated server hosting, and they allocate a server with the specifications they are offering you to your site or service. You get the use of all of the resources on this server, and they maintain and manage it for you, doing things like running back ups, as would be agreed in your contract with them. This is the least complex hosting solution and is ideal for sites that need access to a lot of resources of their own, and need to be able to handle a lot of transactions. For small, simple sites a dedicated server can be overkill, but for busy sites with a lot of user activity, data intensive sites or SaaS, this can often be the most cost effective option.

Shared Hosting

If you don’t need the resources and security of a full server all to yourself, then a cheaper option can be shared hosting. This is where the hardware used in a datacenter is not allocated specifically to customers by machine, so you get a certain amount of resources on machines you share with other people. This is great for small scale websites like personal blogs or local business home pages, as it can be extremely cheap and you can often also get some good perks with a package like software to help you design your site, and even credit to use to advertise your new website when you launch.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is the most recent addition to the list of options, and is effectively an extension of shared hosting, where resources are shared across an infrastructure consisting of lots of machines. The cloud allows you to scale up what you need on demand, and only pay for what you use. It can be great for businesses undergoing rapid growth, and also offers a lot of other benefits in terms of stability and redundancy.

Understanding the different types of hosting is important before you choose a host and get started with your website, so make sure you know the differences and are ready to choose which is right for your needs!

If you have any questions, please ask below!