An introduction to the different types of web hosting services

When a visitor types your URL or clicks your website on your search result that goes to your URL in a browser, it is presented in HTML. The browser reads the coding and displays that as a user-friendly website page.

But more than HTML, content that is available on a website may be hosted on a CMS platform like WordPress has some content within it. This content needs to be stored in a place that is accessible to your visitors.

Website content includes:

• HTML Code
• Text
• Image
• Video
• CSS files
• JavaScript files and a lot more.

These kinds of files need to get stored on servers so it will be easy for the browser to get your website’s content when they need it. Generally, servers physically located data centers have a lot of hardware and computers to perform an action. And this type of storing your content in a server is called web hosting.

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A lot of web hosting is out there based on your needs and the features that you want to use. Let’s go through them one by one.

Free Web Hosting

From the name, you got the kind of this hosting service. Yes, you don’t have to pay for this service. You can host your website for free completely. If you are starting out, then you can learn a lot by this free hosting websites. And a lot of platforms are available to host your content for free. They are:

• WordPress
• Wix
• Blogger
• Zoho
• Weebly

But the thing is you can’t get the complete feature like the self-hosted domain, complete security (important for e-commerce websites), and a lot more features.

The above platforms also offer paid services which you have to pay to store your resources on their servers.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is the prior option for those who started or running a small business. Because of their pan and billing features. Shared web hosting is nothing but sharing your server resources with other web administrators. It has both pros and cons.

The advantage of this hosting service is that it is useful for a website owner who starts their business on a small scale. It comes with an affordable plan and unlimited bandwidth features. The drawback is that your server space is shared with a lot of other website owners like you.

Though the server provider gives unlimited bandwidth, it was shared by hundreds of other site owners too. Sometimes it will slow your website to load and cause some problems. So, you always need to monitor your website’s uptime to avoid the site going down.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller hosting is a kind of web hosting service that allows selling different planned services.

The person can have control over the billing for the usage of storage, CPU, and RAM and also can have access to the control panel. This allows the person to offer different schemes of services to their clients which meets their requirements. A lot of web designers are using this reseller hosting service to host the client’s resources in their server space and also can gain some monthly income by this.

Reseller hosting provides a lot of features like private name servers, technical support from the host to the client itself, and a lot more features.

VPS Web Hosting

VPS is generally called as Virtual Private Server and it is functioning as shared hosting. A lot of shared websites are hosted in a single server with few limitations.

Normally 10 to 15 websites are hosted in a single server and the server space is divided into small slices. Each slice is acting as a separate server.

Dedicated Web Hosting

On this kind of web hosting a server is completely is dedicated to your own resources, no other websites or resources are stored on your dedicated servers. A website who handles a lot of traffic is using this kind of hosting service.

Other hosting types will not provide this kind of feature, because the server is completely dedicated to you. Generally, you need to know how to manage a server if you want to host in a dedicated server plan. Or else you should need a server administrator to manage your dedicated server

A lot of hosting providers are offering managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting services at your convenience.

Colocation Web Hosting

This is the advanced web hosting services and it is kind of like dedicated web hosting. Colocation web hosting means the content owners have to rent a “space” from data centers. Technically, you have to provide the server hardware, the host will provide the supply, uplink, and facility.

You are responsible for the server software, hardware drive, and the backup facilities and also you are responsible for the hardware failure. You have to change the hardware by yourself when it fails.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is suitable for those who are not ok with technical things that will face while hosting their website.

This kind of hosting is especially for WordPress because the host handles all the things including updating frameworks and plugins. Instead of using CPanel or Plesk, you can handle your back-end details on your WordPress dashboard.

Technical support is always excellent from WordPress. It is well suited for the website owners who don’t want to dwell into technical issues caused by the hosting side.

Cluster Web Hosting

This is also a kind of dedicated web hosting but in a different way. People always used to confuse with the cluster hosting with the cloud or grid hosting.

Cluster hosting is a group of servers connected to form a cluster (the group of servers) and interconnected a one to operate as a single “big” server. This offers the web administrators to maintain a huge server at affordable bills.

Self-Service Web Hosting

Self-service hosting is means by the name itself, you have to rent a place for your server and storage. This is the most advanced web hosting. The complete web hosting is at your own responsibility.

The hardware, software, power, bandwidth, cooling, backups, administration, etc. are having to be maintained by your own self.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting technology was introduced to the world in 1992 and Amazon takes it into the market in 2002. Cloud Hosting is also called as Grid Hosting services.

Some famous cloud service providers include Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s Cloud, etc. Did you use Dropbox, Google Docs, One Drive before? They are the popular applications of cloud service.

Cloud hosting is nothing but several servers from different locations or the same location connected together to perform as a single server. It was used to handle the huge spike of traffics and you don’t always have to pay unnecessarily in cloud services.

You only have to pay for the resources you have to use.

Conclusion

Here we listed the different kinds of hosting and it is up to you to choose the best hosting service that will meet your requirements.

People generally go with shared hosting, because it is the basic hosting service with a lot of features. They upgrade or downgrade their plans and hosting based on their requirements.

An introduction to the different types of web hosting services was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.