When it comes to launching or re-launching a website, there's a big difference between renting and buying.
Most business websites are renters -- meaning that they live inside of a Web hosting company rather than on a computer that's owned and operated by the business. This scenario, known as "shared hosting," provides reliability, security and performance for a relatively low price.
But having roommates may not be right for every business. Some sites need more room to roam, faster road access, high security walls or the freedom to do some major renovations. In that case, a dedicated server or a "virtual private server" -- which is a term used to describe partitioning a single server, or computer, to work more like a separate physical computer -- may be a better fit.
For $40 to $150 a month, a virtual private server, which behaves much like a dedicated server, can be yours. For those who need more performance than shared hosting can provide but are still cost-sensitive, it's the way to go.
Then, dedicated hosting -- that is, operating your own physical computer -- typically starts at $200 per month or $2,400 a year and goes up from there. It's more expensive, but you're getting a server-class machine, located in a data center with fast, redundant internet connections and support staff to keep things up-and-running.
If you're still not sure which to choose, here are five questions to ponder:
- How many visitors do you get?
If you expect that your site will get thousands of visitors per day, you'll need a virtual private server at a minimum. - Will you be selling a significant amount online?
If you're turning away customers because your site is too slow, consider stepping up to either a virtual or dedicated server. In addition to resource needs, speed of page loads is important. If your site feels sluggish, you'll likely pay for it with lost sales. - How mission critical is your website?
Do you depend on your website for sales leads? Shared hosting will do the trick. But faster page loads can help improve your lead-capture rates and can even help your Google ranking. So weigh the pros and cons of a basic plan vs. the next step up, and go from there. - Do you have lots of video or audio content?
Streaming video and audio takes a lot of resources and bandwidth. If visitors to your site will be tuning in, you'll need a virtual or dedicated server. - What can your business afford to pay?
Depending on the complexity of your site, a $3 a month service may be all you need. But if you rely on your site for a significant source of revenue, boosting the quality of your offerings may be in order.
Which type of Web hosting service did you choose? Tell us why in the comments section.
-Bob Anderson is director of marketing for InMotion Hosting, a Los Angeles based Web hosting provider serving more than 100,000 small businesses and consumers.
Top photo: vladek/Shutterstock
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Comments:
Looking for when choosing a good hosting company the first thing is that they delay. Many of the tools on the Internet that allows you to check your ping time.
Great Hub! It is truly amazing the efficiency companies of all sizes can achieve through virtualization.
Virtual servers provide the same access to and use of the program. However, users do not need to have a server that contains the actual program is using the software.
If the website is not requiring extra space in the hosting then there is no need to pay extra money for it. On contrary if website require space on the hosting site then go for cheep web hosting with limited space till it exceeds your requirement.
In picking a hosting provider depends on your site, probably personal sites and fun site always choose free hosting does it does not matter slow loading. Online business needs a good hosting like virtual private server or VDS. Thumps up for this topic!
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Conspicuously absent is the choice of Cloud. Offered by quite a few players in that marketplace but mostly dominated by Amazon EC2, RackSpace Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It offers "metered" consumption where you pay for what you consume in terms of cpu cycles, bandwidth, etc. This option embraced primarily by larger business is slowly trickling down to sites with moderate traffic. Its appeals are: pay for what you use, seamless scale-ability if your site starts to grow, and configurations latitude.
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If you use lots of video, you're gonna need a hosting site that can handle lots of bandwidth usage as videos hog space. Piggy backing on that, receiving so many visitors to your blog each day that you have to upgrade hosting services is a good thing. Thanks for the article. Denise writemoneyinc.com
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In my points of view most of the people like Joomla CMS. It's user friendly. Easy to handle. I get it clear idea about web hosting and CMS.
I follow above your points to register new domain. Most of the small business people prefer to select this kind of services. All the points are explained very clearly.
If you do go the route of shared hosting for your website, make sure you choose a web host that has various means of contacting them in case of trouble, especially a telephone number. If the host's servers go down, and the only means of contacting them is an email address, your business could be in big trouble. There are many inexpensive web hosts out there, make sure you are choosing the right one. Your web developer should be able to help you.
Great overview of different usercases on a couple of hosting scnearios. However - the knowledge of the devteam about how to run virtual or dedicated servers might pay off, since they can probably get more creative to the solution if more control of server setup it provided.. At least that is my experience. Peter Westlund (@bastlund)
Hi everyone, you can get the infographic's HTML code for sharing here at www.inmotionhosting.com/infographics
Solid overview but I'd like to add a couple of things if you don't mind. 0) While certainly the hyped flavor of the moment I'm somewhat shocked The Cloud as an option was not mentioned. Cloud is especially attractive for those who might be prone to experiencing wide swings in traffic or perhaps require constantly expanding storage.1) A VPS might be necessary if you need your own IP address. Due to spam, some services (e.g. Twitter) are known to block some very reputable hosting companies (or at least a series of their servers) from using their API. To get out of the blocked block of IP addresses a VPS might do the trick.2) Also be sure to consult with your developer(s). All things being equal - and quite often hosting on the surface looks like a commodity - there might be subtle things your developer knows. At the very least if they are familiar with a particular hosting company then that consistency might be a saving grace later. Finally, FWIW, and I hope you don't mind me saying so, I've been using Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?468468) for both shared hosting and VPS for 3 or 4 years now. I am consistently pleased with them. Their support has come to the rescue on multiple occasions and are always easy to deal with.