Choosing the right web-hosting package can be a bewildering task.
With so many companies from a number of countries vying for your business, offering so many different prices, terms and conditions, it’s important that you understand what you need from a web-hosting company.
So here’s a list of the major types of web-hosting on the market, what they are and what they’re suitable for. And to make it a bit easier, we’ll follow the career of Dave*, a budding web entrepreneur making his first forays into the world of web hosting.
Free hosting
Free hosting is exactly that, and although the old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ doesn’t exactly apply – as you are getting something, after all – free hosting is not recommended for anyone with serious aspirations for their site.
Of course, my company offers web hosting so we would say that, right? Well, the two main things to consider when looking at free hosting are one, someone has to pay for it, and two, what happens if something goes wrong?
Regarding the first point, your web hosting is often paid for by advertisements on your site, and as that is what makes the web host their money, they could well be as interested in advertising on your site as they are in getting you to use their service so they can have more adverts.
This leads on to point two: what kind of support do you think you will get from a company that is giving you something for free? What kind of guarantees can you have that your web hosting is reliable or secure?
It is also common for internet service providers (ISPs), among others, to offer free hosting as part of a package with other services (such as broadband or digital TV). These are better solutions as they obviously come attached to a reputable company that will be able to provide support.
Again, though, remember that their other service is paying for your hosting; the hosting is an enticing extra. Support may not be the best if the provider specialises in other products and services.
Some companies, for instance Blogger start, will offer free online spaces for specific sites (in Blogger’s case, you get a free online blog). However, you’re limited to what you can do with the templates they give you, and you won’t be able to expand your site or even have your own domain name.
So, only go for free hosting if you’re completely satisfied that the company can give you what you want. We wouldn’t advise choosing free hosting for a business-related site in any circumstances!
In Dave’s instance, he has been given some free hosting as part of a deal with his ISP. Dave’s never made a website of his own before and he’s certainly never had any web hosting.
He’s interested but a bit lost, and manages to build a basic, personal site with only a few difficulties. He stumbles across Wordpress and finds that he doesn’t get any databases with his free hosting.
As the hosting is part of his package – and free – his ISP doesn’t have any facility to upgrade his account. Dave decides he wants his blog on the internet and, after talking to a friend on Blogger and thinking dreamily about starting an online business, contacts some web-hosting companies to see what’s out there.
Shared hosting
This is the most common form of web hosting available. A company sets up one or more servers to be used for web hosting and their customers in turn pay for a portion of that server and share it with other customers – so a server may be responsible for several hundred websites at a time.
Shared hosting has many advantages. It’s the cheapest form of commercial hosting as the cost of the server can be offset by the many customers who can use it at once.
They don’t require advanced technical knowledge to use and you only need to administer your account – at no point do you have anything to do with the server. As it is a paid-for solution you will have access to customer support, a contract, uptime guarantees and so on.
The disadvantage is that, as you’re sharing a server with other customers, you’re also sharing its resources. The server, just like a home PC, has only so much memory, CPU and disk space available, and if other customers are using it heavily, the web host has put too many people on the server, or even if the server isn’t particularly fast in the first place, you may well find that your website appears slow.
You’ll also find that shared hosting doesn’t allow a lot of the advanced, powerful features of higher-end options. There’s a slight increase in security risk, too, as you can never be sure how secure your ‘neighbours’ are – but bear in mind that the server will be very secure in the first place, so the risk is not something to be alarmed about.
So our friend Dave starts out with a very simple web-hosting package, with a little web space and a database. He installs Wordpress and starts to blog seriously, before deciding to start his online business.
With his basic account he commissions a web-design company to build him an eCommerce site, with his blog built in as a feature. As his store grows he finds that he can expand his site fairly easily without having to worry about any of the limits he had with the ISP.
Shared hosting is the ideal solution for most sites and users. With a few exceptions, only people who want their own server and/or control over the contents of it will need anything else.
So Dave, like many people, is perfectly happy – until he decides to quit his day job and go full-time with his eCommerce site. At this point, Dave, who is a bit more knowledgeable about web hosting now, considers if there is anything he can do to improve his site.
Reseller hosting
Reseller hosting is a generic term that applies to several different kinds of web hosting. It isn’t a definition of the kind of web hosting on offer, as such, more the kind of person offering it.
A hosting reseller purchases a large web-hosting account from a web-hosting company and sells portions of the account to its own customers. They are essentially providing the services of a web-hosting company, without having to set up and finance the expensive hardware and its maintenance themselves.
This kind of web hosting is popular with start-up web-hosting businesses, companies with a large portfolio of sites and web-design companies wanting to offer hosting to their clients.
A hosting reseller may be offering shared, VPS or dedicated solutions (see part two of this article, coming soon). Customers tend to benefit from cheaper web hosting as a reseller often purchases their web hosting at a discount.
The only major drawback with reseller hosting is that the reseller is also a customer of a web-hosting company. The more advanced the hosting they are offering, the more support the reseller can give you directly, but if you contact them about a technical fault they might have to refer your query onto their web-hosting company.
Reseller hosting is only of use to Dave if he decides to sell hosting to other people or expand his business with a large portfolio of other sites. If he was looking to do either of these he’d probably stick with shared hosting, as it is the most popular form of hosting and he’d get more use out of it.
For now though, Dave thinks he’s happy with a single site, he would just prefer to have more control and performance as his site is getting quite busy and he has a few demanding redesign plans in mind. So, in the second part of this article, we’ll look at some of the more advanced web-hosting options available to Dave (and you, of course).
*Dave is not real. He is for illustrative purposes only, and any resemblance to any Dave or events that have happened to any Dave, living, dead or otherwise, is purely coincidental.
