The Fundamentals of Web Hosting: Shared, VPS and Cloud Hosting

In this article we are going to deal with Fundamentals about the Web Hosting elements like Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting. When deciding to host a website with a third party service provider, there are two types of hosting that can be considered: shared hosting and virtual private servers (VPS). Both these options have their own advantages and disadvantages which have to be considered while taking a decision.

#1. Shared Server Hosting

In this system, single server is shared by multiple websites and the server resources are limited for each website account. The biggest advantage is that it is less expensive. It is possible to offer this low price because more than one customer is allowed to use a server. To protect one customer’s information from another’s, file security is used. Set up fee for shared server is excluded from the costs and the costs only reflect the resources required by the website. Thus, it is an affordable solution for small websites.

The Disadvantages

Because of the presence of multiple accounts on a single shared server, certain limitations are imposed. The hard disk space, the bandwidth use and limited email accounts. Also, you cannot make any changes in the software of server as that would make it incompatible with websites hosted in the same server. Thus, it is best suited to small websites which have low traffic.

Shared Hosting

#3. Virtual Private Server Hosting
The virtual private server or VPS hosting works on a similar theory as shared server hosting. In VPS however, there are lesser number of websites residing in the same server. The difference is that, each VPS account runs its own virtual server environment. Because of this, the websites can have more advanced features and much improved performance. VPS keeps its customer’s information more private and secure than the shared server hosting does. This is accomplished by putting the customer’s information on a different operating system (OS) than the information of other customers who are on the same shared server. Thus the customers get the benefits of a dedicated server, but at a much cheaper price.

VPS also provides their customers with a private email server so that no one else will be able to misuse their email accounts. Most importantly, VPS hosting allows the website owners to install customized applications to the server, since only the user has root access to their virtual server. There is no security risk as with shared hosting.

VPS is a good solution for websites that need higher resources in a secure and stabilized form but do not have the budget for a dedicated server. VPS allows websites to have more disk space, larger bandwidth and many other resources. VPS can be said to be a middle path between shared and dedicated hosting.

VPS Hosting

#3. Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a similar concept to shared server hosting as multiple websites share a single environment. The major difference is that the hosting server is comprised of a collection of servers that are linked together to create one massive hosting resource. When the server requires more resources, then it can use the resources of the other servers connected to its cloud. It is supported by a pool of distributed servers also known as grid computing. Cloud server hosting provides practically limitless bandwidth, hard disk space and processing powers.

Cloud Computing

Cloud hosting is most likely to be the future of web hosting and is extremely beneficial to websites which have unpredictable and sporadic traffic flow. Website owners do not have to specify their requirements upfront; they have the liberty of using as much or as little resources as they need and are billed accordingly.