Web hosting has become a much sought after activity in terms of online business, especially after the rapid advancement of Internet services. You have the space to 'host' your personal homepage, or business profile and webpage through a web hosting company. As even your prospective employers might want to look at your personal thoughts or other details from your own web page, using a web hosting company can thus prove very profitable to you. By creating great networks through your business website, you can successfully expand and consolidate your business over the Internet. One must understand the importance of web hosting for all of this to work.

There are a lot of types of web hosting services like free and paid hosting, shared and clustered web hosting, file and dedicated web hosting, etc. So when you select a web host, you have to consider your needs for it.

Three common kinds of web hosting are as follows:

Shared hosting

A shared host is a server which supports many web pages. A shared host is generally the best for a business where the expenses does not permit them to go for the dedicated web hosting services, and a shared hosting helps them save a lot of unnecessary expenses as well.

In case of shared hosting, various maintenance features like server management, security updates, server software and anti-virus backup are provided by the provider of the shared hosting.

Web hosting can be conducted in two basic ways: based on the IP address and based on the name. In the former case, the host having his unique IP address provides every website that he hosts with their individual SSL certificates, which gives the website owners a lot of security. In case of the latter way, a lot of websites which the provider hosts are assigned just one IP address, which everyone uses.

Using a shared host might come cheap, but it comes without the sense of security that is there in IP based hosting.

There are also several other disadvantages of the name based hosting system like its incompatibility with relatively old browsers. A HTTP/1.0 browser without up gradation will fail to send out requests carrying the host name. Also because they share same digital certificates, Hand name based hosts cannot support HTPPS websites either. And if the Domain Name System or the DNS conks out any website hosted by a name based web host becomes virtually impossible to access.

So keeping aside the cost benefits of a shared web hosting system, its lack of features like lower disk space and bandwidth, slow speed of the site due to many others using the same server, etc., clearly outweighs the cost benefit. A webmaster can have little control over things like the system software and the scripts. However, the silver lining is that if you don't use the website for extensive business purpose, and if you can adjust with the flaws of a shared web host, there is nothing better than that. However, you must be acquainted with Virtual Private Server [VPS] if you wish to have greater control over your website.

Virtual Private Server

Much like a shared server, even a VPS has a single server, but it uses software which divided it into many virtual machines. So though many websites still use the same server, each VPS gets its own RAM allotment, besides bandwidth and disk space, and they can operate independently by using the resources allocated to them.

Because you are granted this much greater freedom as compared to a shared host, you can do various things from running a totally different OS to having your own scripts and software of choice, without affecting the other sites on the server.

The root level access to the main server that you get in a VPS is virtually similar to the freedoms associated with dedicated servers. Only in case of a VPS you can install software of your choice, create accounts etc all at a comparatively lesser price than a dedicated server.

Due to the internal divisions of the system of the VPS, there is more security to a website than what a shared host provides. In a shared host, if someone hacked into the main server, then every site would get affected, which is not so in case of VPS.

As far as the division of the server is concerned, it usually occurs evenly with the total equal distribution of resources among the number of websites that are sharing the server. So, if there are 10 websites on a VPS server, everything starting from the disk space to the RAM is divided into 10 parts, with each website getting 10% of the whole.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated hosting facilities are meant for individuals and big businesses who are eager to take control of not only their websites but also the functioning process of the web host. A dedicated server offers people the benefit of doing that because as the name suggests, in this case a single website is hosted by a single server. The freedom ad control here is manifold, as the website owner has only to look into the web software related matters and can exercise his freedom as far as that is concerned. While other issues like security, power supervision and data maintenance etc are looked after by the hosting company.

Dedicated web hosting is the best choice is you need high amount of bandwidth, more disk space and a customized server. Besides, you get to choose the features for the website as well, like the software, settings, operating system and multimedia requirements. It's a good option to consider if you can't manage a private server due to limited expenses.

A dedicated server can save your expenses to the tune of 85%, if there is a lot of traffic o your website, but you are restricted by the technical knowledge and money to have your personalized IT staff.

Using a dedicated server also offers 100% assurance and security to you, because you know that you are the only one who is using this server. Apart from security concerns, not having other sites on the server also nullifies issues about downtime problems. Companies that need to have client databases and other important information up on their sites are bound to feel much safer using a managed dedicated host which provides the client with an extra layer of data security.

So while the costs of a shared host are less, they are never very secure and never so easily accessible as dedicated web hosts are. Using the latter might require you to shell out some extra expenses, but given that it gives you a very higher level of safety than a shared server makes the additional expenses worth incurring. For purposes of business growth, a dedicated server is a must!