Advantages And Benefits Of Different Types Of Shared Web Hosting

One of the primary requirements for putting up your own website is web hosting. A web host is a computer, usually called a server, which holds all of the files required to run your website as well as those required to make your web pages available to everyone over the Internet. Hosting companies usually have many servers - often hundreds of them. Each computer is capable of hosting one website or hundreds of websites, depending on the hardware and software installed on it.

There are many different kinds of hosting, and choosing the best one for your website or your company's website depends upon many factors. Understanding what each type of hosting account offers you and requires from you can help you make the right choice.

Free Web Hosting

There are a number of ways that you can get free web hosting. Many Internet service providers offer free web space to their customers, for example. There are also some web companies that offer free hosting and make their money from the ads served on those web sites. In general, free web hosts don't allow you to host your own domain, so you'll be stuck with a long, unwieldy URL that's not very friendly to search engines. Few of them provide you with access to databases required to run applications like discussion forums, blogs, catalogs and shopping carts, and many of them greatly limit the number of pages you can put up and the amount of bandwidth you can consume. If you just want to put up a personal web page and don't plan to make any money from it, this kind of hosting account can work for you.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is usually the cheapest type of web hosting account available. With shared hosting, your website will share a server with hundreds, and perhaps thousands of other websites. You'll be sharing all of the resources of the computer on which your site is hosted with all of those other websites. Those resources include storage space and CPU capabilities. Shared web hosting can work fine for most small websites that don't require a lot of processing power. The major issue most companies have with shared hosting is that your site may run more slowly than you like, or even be inaccessible if other websites are using up too many resources.

Clustered Web Hosting

Clustered web hosting is a different kind of shared web hosting that tends to resolve many of the sharing issues. With clustering, every web page is hosted by several servers. That way, each web page is less affected by the activities of other websites because the resources are allocated more efficiently. Clustered web hosting is a reasonable accommodation for a small business website. Both shared and clustered hosting often offer some control over your own section of the server, including the ability to make some changes to your hosting environment to allow code for applications to run. Many of them also include a limited number of databases so that you can store data for easy retrieval by applications like shopping carts and discussion boards.

Virtual Hosting

Virtual hosting is an interesting cross between shared and dedicated servers. The web hosting company divides up the resources of the computer among many users and web sites, and sets up "walls" between them so that none can access the resources reserved for others. Each user will have the same options they'd have if they were on their own server, including the ability to change configuration and settings so that they can run their own applications, set up many different websites and even sell hosting accounts themselves.

Choosing the right web hosting type for your websites is an important decision. Before you make a decision, sit down and decide what resources you'll need to run the website you want.