Thinking about starting a website? Great – which hosting is right for you? Good question. Let’s take a quick look at our two most basic options.
The first, and most common – shared hosting. What is this exactly? You have one server hosting many thousands of websites running a platform like cPanel. Cheap, easy to maintain, prone to performance issues. One poorly coded script or plugin could negatively impact all customers.
You also have little to no control over what operating system or software is used. What you see is what you get. However, we have seen customers pay as little as $5 a year for shared hosting. That may not sound like a lot, 5,000 or even 10,000 sites hosted on one physical server can really add up.
Want a little more control? A VPS or virtual private server may be the answer. VPS’ can come in many shapes and sizes. The most common is how big your slice of the larger computer is. The bigger the slice you have, the more you pay but the more room you have to play. You can install various operating systems (usually flavors of Linux) and customize all of your software installs. Depending on the price – you could be on your own for updates and troubleshooting. We normally recommend this to someone who is a bit more technical. You may want to tinker a bit more. You may have some certain requirements. OR, you may just want some more dedicated resources with some isolation.
Stay tuned for our next posts as we continue down a series on hosting. Upcoming posts to include dedicated hosting, internet protocol discussion and many other topics. We strive to provide a solid foundation to help educate our viewers, sharing knowledge is essential building blocks.
