Different Types of Web Hosting Accounts

No Cost Web Hosting

The most basic web hosting you’ll find is completely free. Companies can provide it for free by inserting advertisements on your pages and limited the number of features you have access to. Free hosting is a good choice for people who only want to put up personal sites that won’t receive much traffic.

You’ll either get a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yoursite). You won’t get much storage or bandwidth and can expect minimal if any support for MYSQL, PHP, more than one email address, and site statistics.

Shared Web Hosting Service

The most used type of web hosting is shared hosting. Most small businesses, professional sites and medium to large sites consider shared hosting to be perfect for their needs. Since none of these types of companies need an entire server to themselves and would have to spend hundreds of dollars to get one anyway, shared hosting works for them.

As you might have guessed, shared hosting allows multiple sites to be hosted on only one server. They provide system administration, which keeps people from having to deal with running a server and multiple users and sites.

Even though the hosting plan you’ve chosen determines the specifics of what you get, most plans will include PHP or ASP, MySQL, more than one email address, and increased bandwidth and storage compared to a free host. The main disadvantage to a shared host is that you’re open to possible security risks since you’re sharing a server with multiple other sites.

Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting

If you need more bandwidth, storage and features than what’s provided by free or shared hosting, then unmanaged dedicated hosting is perfect. A dedicated server will provide you with more bandwidth as well as an unlimited amount of email addresses and databases. Most dedicated hosting plans provide you with 500 to 1,000GB bandwidth each month and another hard drive can be purchased if you need more than that.

The main disadvantage of unmanaged dedicated hosting is that you have to be the server administrator. There isn’t anybody else there to do it for you. You have a couple of options open to you if you don’t know how to do this. One, you can go and learn how to be a server administrator. Alternatively, check out the next hosting option.

Managed Dedicated Hosting

So you’ve decided that you don’t want to become a server administrator but do want the capabilities provided by dedicated hosting? Then managed dedicated hosting is for you.

Taking this path means there will be somebody there to get your server up and running for you. You’ll have help if anything ever goes wrong. When looking into managed dedicated hosting, however, you should get a referral from somebody you trust or complete some diligent Internet research. How much this type of dedicated hosting costs depends entirely on reliability, security and amount of support you want.