Choosing a suitable web hosting for your online business is a long term commitment. You must choose wisely based on your traffic needs and budget. Taking a high-end cost web hosting plan for a new startup website with no or little traffic is totally overkill if you ask me. There are several types of web hosting plans available in the market. The main types of web hosting plans in the market are shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting.

shared web shoting

Shared hosting is an economical option for webmasters who want need a cheap hosting to host their websites. Shared hosting is low cost and suitable for people who just launch their online businesses. It comes with readily installed applications which you can use to install different types of scripts on your website easily. It is not suitable for webmasters that want to have access to the entire server. Most shared hosting uses control panels such as cPanel, and Plesk. Some web hosting companies will provide a control panel system that they developed themselves for the webmasters. There are many web hosting companies offering unlimited storage and bandwidth for customers. Before buying, make sure you check with the provider about the real limit of the unlimited hosting plan so that you know how much resources are actually allotted to you.

vps web hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a server which can be divided into many compartments. Each webmaster can restart its own compartment in the VPS server without affecting other compartments. This allows it to operate like a dedicated server. The advantage is that your website will be more secure from hackers or spam websites. In a shared hosting environment, your website may be affected if one of the website on the server happened to be attacked by virus. It will not happen on a VPS server because only the particular container will be shut down when it is affected. VPS hosting is great for people who cannot afford to pay the expensive cost of a dedicated hosting plan.

dedicated web hosting

Dedicated hosting is suitable for webmaster that require a lot of resources such as disk space, bandwidth CPU and memory. Dedicated hosting may be expensive but it offers a lot of benefit. It offers higher reliability and security. It offers better uptime percentage and server response time. It allows you to have more control over the server. You can choose from 3 types of dedicated hosting including managed, semi managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting services. If you don’t have staff with IT expertise, you should choose a managed dedicated hosting plan so that the web host can maintain the server on your behalf. Managed dedicated hosting plans usually come with control panel that allows you to easily manage your website. Unmanaged dedicated hosting plans are cheaper as webmasters will not be receiving support from the web hosting company.

Alternatively, you may also look at free site hosting available on the market if you don’t want to pay for web hosting at first or you just need a simple resource to host your website. Upgrades are commonly available on these free web hosting provider which you can do at anytime in the future.