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The terminology used in web hosting can often be confusing for the person not conversant with the current buzzwords. What follows is a basic breakdown of types of hosting types and the differences between them. No type is essentially better than any other type but each fits different needs and levels of growth.

The terminology used in web hosting can often be confusing for the person not conversant with the current buzzwords. What follows is a basic breakdown of types of hosting types and the differences between them. No type is essentially better than any other type but each fits different needs and levels of growth.

Free Hosting might be the exception to the rule that all types are equally beneficial, in that it lacks significant features other sites have as a matter of course. For the individual it could well be an excellent choice at no cost. However, for a business these free sites lack the ability to use an individual domain name and that means when the website finally outgrows the free site, it cannot be taken with the business.

Community hosting or free sites are not usually favored for businesses because they tend to limit growth. Sometimes a new business person will built traffic to a site and then find they have to move because they have outgrown the server package, in that case moving the entire site may be difficult or impossible. In addition these sites will normally insert advertisements in the web page to defray their costs, this can have a negative impact on sales.

The shard host service is a basic type and what shared means is that many sites will share the same machine. Use of resources is very tightly controlled on most of these plans but they are excellent for beginning or light traffic websites. The shared host will normally include the extras to make a business site easier to plan and integrate such as a control panel for each site, File uploads via FTP, email handling and sometimes even ecommerce shopping carts. These are usually low cost plans.

While not exactly a negative point, the fact is that most successful websites will grow in traffic and eventually begin to take more than their share of server resources. At that point, the business should usually begin to look for a larger type of plan one which has fewer users and more bandwidth. If the site owner wants to remain with the current host many of them will over the next step and even help to move their site over.

The virtual private server is a server that has been divided into much larger sections with each user having their own control panels their own databases and their own operating system. This environment allows for more storage space and is a lot more configurable than a regular shared server. Unlike the shared server basic, the site owner can configure almost every aspect of their virtual server.

These virtual servers give a site owner a lot more freedom, space and bandwidth. However they are still sharing the server resources with other sites. A site that draws too heavily on the resources, such as one with a very large amount of traffic at one time can slow the others down or crash the server. It is an excellent choice for a medium level website, but not ideal for the intermediate sites which are growing daily in traffic.

Finally is the dedicated server option, which means that the website is on its own machine, which it shares with no one. In that case, there is little or no worry about bringing down the server for other users or having a site suspended for using too many resources. However many servers are unmanaged that means that the site owner must take care of the software upgrades and other configurations. The ideal server would be the managed dedicated plan. The managed dedicated server leaves the website owner free to focus on what they do best and that is marketing and the management of the server is handled by the web hosting company.