Do you feel a little confused with the different types of website and web hosting services?
If so, do not feel bad, you are not alone. With hundreds and hundreds of web companies competing for your business with thousands of different web hosting packages, everything can get pretty confusing pretty quickly.
Add to that all the terms "technical geek" like bandwidth, GB, and DNS and it's easy to see how someone who just wants to start an online business and make money online can easily get discouraged.
As your online business grows, your web hosting needs will increase and become more complex. Free and cheap web hosting plans may be fine in the startup phase of your online business, but if your site begins to feel sluggish as it continues to grow and you get more traffic to the site, you may need to start considering improving the web server
Think of this list as developing the kind of plans and hosting services that can be considered by a growing online business.
With that said, let's talk about the most common types of web hosting plans and determine which one best suits your business needs; whether you are just starting an online business or wanting to take your online business to the next level.
1. Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting means just that. Your website is hosted on a server owned by other websites. The advantage of this arrangement is the shared cost. You can pay as little as $ 5- $ 10 per month to share a super server with (possibly) hundreds (or thousands) of other websites.
The biggest disadvantage of a shared hosting account is that you are at the mercy of other sites on your server. Very popular sites can affect the performance of your own site. On the other hand, if you are the most popular site on the server, you could use a super server for a very low price.
When most people start an online business they usually start with a shared hosting plan to minimize costs, and they may not get a lot of traffic at first.
Shared hosting is great for brochure type sites, or new sites that do not get a lot of traffic.
Price range: $ 5 - $ 20 / month.
Bluehost is a very popular shared web hosting option.
2. Reseller Web Hosting
The reseller hosting package is basically a shared hosting account with an extra tool to help you resell hosting space.
Reseller packages come with greater technical controls (often through the Web Host Manager (WHM) control panel), billing software to help you bill clients and other additional facilities.
Some of these facilities include:
� free website templates
� white label technical support - that means the hosting company takes care of your client's technical support issues
� private name servers - make your company look even bigger by telling your clients to redirect their domain name servers to ns1.yourwebdesignfirm.com
Price range: Reseller packages range from $ 15- $ 50, depending on features and resource constraints.
If you are planning to sell web hosting as a business then reseller web hosting is perfect for you. If not, stick with a shared hosting plan if you're just getting started.
Also, if you are interested in making money as an affiliate web hosting, you definitely want to see this article on how to make money with affiliate marketing.
3. Cloud-Based Web Hosting
Cloud-Based Web Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology that allows hundreds of individual servers to work together to look like one giant server. The idea is that as more needs grow, the hosting company can add more commodity hardware to make the grid or cloud bigger.
The advantage of cloud-based web hosting is that if you get tremendous amounts of site traffic, then a web hosting plan can accommodate spikes in traffic - rather than shutting down your website.
If your site is growing and you are driving more traffic to your website, this is probably the first point you will also upgrade from a shared hosting plan.
Price Range: All grid computing packages use some form of paid price structure for what you use.
4. Virtual Private Server
Virtual private servers share one physical server but act like several separate servers. VPS is a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own specialized machine. Although each VPS shares hardware resources, they allocate dedicated computing resources.
"VPS avoids problems because your hosting neighbors lower your site while avoiding the cost of dedicated servers."
Price Range: Most VPS hosting plans cost between $ 50 and $ 200. The price is based on the CPU and the secure memory (RAM) you get.
5. Dedicated Web Server
When you have a dedicated server, it means you hire one physical server from a hosting company. You can have full control (called "root" permissions on Linux) if you want it.
With a dedicated server, you do not have to worry about the other websites on the shared server taking up your resources and slowing down your site.
A dedicated server is generally the highest level server you need if your online business grows into an ever-increasing presence of website traffic. While the cost of a dedicated server is significantly higher than shared hosting, your business will be at the point of being able to easily purchase the necessary fees to have your own server.
Price: Dedicated server valued from $ 100 and up. But if you are considering a dedicated server, you should also consider the cost to hire a system administrator to take care of the technical details.
6. Colocation Web Hosting
When you colocate, you rent rack space from the data center. You bring your own server hardware and they provide power, cooling, physical security, and internet uplink. This means you are responsible for server software, data storage, backup procedures, etc. If the hardware fails, you are responsible for replacing it and restoring and running the server.
Unless you have the technical knowledge at home, colocation may not be worth the investment in terms of time, expertise, and money for most small businesses.
7. Mandiri Web Hosting Services
The ultimate hosting plan - you do it all yourself! You buy a server, install and configure the software, make sure there are adequate cooling and power in your engine room, and fold it all up for redundancy. Some things you should keep:
� data center space
� cooling
� power (with backup)
� bandwidth
� server hardware
� system administrator
� data integrity and backup
Similar to colocation web hosting, this is most likely out of the reach of what you want to do as an online business owner.
8. Managed Wordpress Hosting
With the increasing popularity of WordPress as a web-making platform, many web hosting servers offer what is referred to as "Managed WordPress Hosting.
In short, managed WordPress hosting is a service where web hosting providers will keep your WordPress installation up-to-date that can help protect your site from security threats that allow hackers to get into your website.
Although not as cheap as shared web hosting, this is the right choice to start a business and a well-established business using the WordPress platform.
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