Which website hosting service will be best for me?
There are different sorts of web hosting solutions suitable for different sites in regard to the resources or the hosting environment they demand. To choose the most appropriate hosting service for your site, you must reckon what server-side software it demands, how many hits per day you expect at the start and in the future, as well as any other special needs that may have to be satisfied.
Shared Hosting - Positive Signs
The most adequate choice for small scale websites with a few hundred or webspace hosting, each client pays only for their plan, which decreases the total price per user critically. There are various web hosting accounts differing from one hosting provider to another, offering different amounts of web space and bandwidth, different electronic mail account quotas and so on. The benefit is that you can obtain a package that will have the resources your website indeed needs. You will not need to pay a lot of cash for a package you will not make use of, or wind up with a small size account that cannot shelter the web page. At Smartway Hosting, there is a great collection of shared hosting plans suitable for personal or small business web portals that even offer pre-installed script-based platforms such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal or WordPress - to make it simpler. If you begin with a cheaper package and you need more resources, moving to a more feature-rich package requires only a click of the mouse.
Shared Website Hosting - Drawbacks
A weakness of the shared hosting platform is that the web hosting servers have some software programs installed on them and you cannot activate new software programs. Some online portals, particularly online storefronts, demand applications to be available on the web server for them to run, and with a shared site hosting account, you can activate only software that does not demand complete root-level access.
Virtual Hosting Servers and Dedicated Web Servers
For web pages that demand full root-level access, or if your web site has many 1000's or even millions of viewers per day, what you need is a VPS or a dedicated server. A Virtual Private Server is a virtual emulation of a dedicated server and it functions in precisely the same manner.
Private Virtual Web Servers
Both services commonly provide complete root-level access and can be restarted via a software interface by the customer, independently from the web hosting provider. Similar to the shared web hosting packages, the virtual web server hosting and the dedicated web hosting packages come with different specifications based on what the hosting supplier has to offer. A virtual web server hosting package has guaranteed storage space, RAM and CPU usage quotas that can occasionally be extended for short intervals of time provided that there are unused system resources on the physical machine. With a dedicated hosting server, the only limiting factor is the hardware equipment it is utilizing, and it can be upgraded by changing or adding components. A virtual web server is simpler to administer as it includes a virtualization panel, which can be used to reboot it, to install applications, explore statistics, and so on. The management of a dedicated web server is more intricate, so such an account would rather be resorted to by skilled users.
Dedicated Web Servers
However, some hosting corporations provide managed dedicated server hosting solutions where they run dedicated server administration tasks instead of the customer. This can be included in the plan or an additional service.
Before You Select...
Picking the top hosting package is important as it can affect the proper operation of a site. Prior to settling on a plan, compare the pros and cons, inspect carefully all the requirements for the online portal to work properly, particularly if it is script-powered, and, last but not least, if you have already settled on a hosting company, the best choice would be to ask their support team for an opinion as to which particular package would be best for the stable performance of your site.