Types Of Web Hosting

In order to publish a website on the Internet you will require some form of web hosting. While it is possible to set up a PC in your home or office to act as a web server there are many reasons why this might not prove to be the most effective solution especially considering the prices of web hosting accounts and the features that are offered. There are three basic types of hosting – shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. Shared hosting is the most basic and inexpensive type of hosting, offering more than adequate storage and bandwidth allowance even for larger websites with very good levels of traffic. Some software is usually installed on the server and control panels and other features make shared hosting a genuinely useful method of publishing your website. A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a partitioned portion of a server. This allows for greater security than with shared hosting and typically offers greater flexibility in the software and scripts that you can install as well as an increased bandwidth and storage allowance for each website that is hosted on that server. A dedicated server is an entire physical server used by just one company or individual allowing for the storage of large amounts of data and the publishing if extremely busy and populous websites. You can usually install any application or script while the host will still deal with the physical maintenance of the server. You can also usually ask the host to install extra hardware to further update a dedicated server.