Web Hosting is a service provided by a company, called a web host, that allows individuals and businesses to make their website available to the World Wide Web. Web hosting companies provide space on their servers for their customers to use via a lease agreement. This agreement usually requires the customer to pay a monthly or yearly fee for the space.

Web hosting companies offer a wide range of options for it’s customers depending on their needs. An individual or small business with a relatively basic website or blog has very different needs than a large corporation that receives tens of thousands of visits per month.

Let’s take a look at some of the different types of web hosting:

Shared Hosting

This type of hosting is typically what most websites you will visit will be running on. Shared hosting means that one server is hosting multiple websites.

When you purchase shared hosting you are sharing disk space, bandwidth, and other resources with other customers. This is the lowest cost solution and is very easy to manage even for someone with no experience. Shared hosting also includes a number of extra features at no additional cost. Shared hosting is usually the best option for individuals and small companies for ease of use and a small price tag.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is a great option for entrepreneurs and small businesses who would like to profit from the web hosting industry. Just as the name implies, when you purchase reseller hosting you become a reseller of the hosting that you purchased. Reseller hosting is purchased at a certain price for a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth giving you the opportunity to resell that same hosting to others for a profit.

Since you are purchasing the reseller hosting at a flat fee you have the potential to make quite a bit of money if you market your business well. Reseller hosting also gives you the ability to look like a large web hosting company allowing you to compete in the industry.

VPS or Virtual Private Server Hosting

A Virtual Private Server, or VPS, is a server that is created by partitioning a single physical server into multiple individual servers, or virtual servers. This process is called virtualization and creates multiple environments that run many of the same functions as a single dedicated server.

A VPS is a great alternative to a dedicated server mainly because of it’s lower price tag and is also in some cases a necessary, yet still affordable, step up from the shared hosting option.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is the option where you will have complete control over a single server. Dedicated hosting is the exact opposite as shared hosting meaning that you are not sharing your server with anyone else. Since the server is not shared you have superior flexibility and performance.

Dedicated hosting, however, is not a good option for the inexperienced user. Since you have complete control over the server you are required to have the knowledge necessary to choose the correct operating system for the server, setup the server, backup the server, setup security on the server, as well as many other tasks.

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting is essentially the same as dedicated hosting accept you will not need to understand and have all the knowledge necessary to manage your server. What this means is that you will have a dedicated server but will be paying for someone else to manage it for you.

This is a very costly hosting option but if you require a dedicated server and don’t have the knowledge or time to manage it yourself then managed hosting is the way to go.