Website hosting is one of the key factors for success of your website, so it is important to understand what options to consider, when choosing website hosting. Web hosting has great affect on the site's performance and availability and because you want your website to be fast and to be online, it is important to choose proper web hosting plan.
Website Hosting Types:
1. Shared hosting.
Shared hosting is the cheapest type of website hosting that you can get. With shared hosting your website would share web server with other websites and there would be hundreds or even thousands other websites on the same server. All these websites will share the same resources. It will have very negative effect on your website performance. Also, if your website start getting some traffic, your web host often would send you warning about CPU and RAM overages (excessive use), because shared hosting gives you very small share of CPU and RAM resources.
You also cannot choose the software to install on the server. Shared website hosting is also the least secure option from all hosting types. Though the cheapest, usually between $5 and $10 per month, this is the option that I cannot recommend for any website, if your goal is to make money or at least to get some customers for your business. Yes, it is cheap and it is widely used type of website hosting, but you do get, what you pay for.
2. Virtual Private Server or VPS.
VPS is another widely used type of website hosting. VPS would have few (or few dozens, depending on the plan ant its cost) virtual machines, installed one one server. VPS has a lots less websites on one server than shared hosting and provide much better security and separation between websites than shared hosting and it gives you a lot more control over web server and your website. If it is true VPS hosting, the hosting plan should clearly state how much RAM and CPU resources you would get. It should specify the amount of resources that you would get. Something like: 4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM, 200 GB disk space (it means hard drive space) and the amount of traffic to your website per month.
The traffic could be unlimited or it could have limit set in GBs (bandwidth) or in number of visitors (in thousands). Please note that plans, that say equal share of CPU or RAM, are not true VPS hosting plans. That could affect site performance, and cause overage warning just like with Shared Hosting. The price for such plans should be below true VPS hosting plans, but higher than Shared Hosting.
Another very important feature, that is often offered with VPS is full root access. Root access is important, because it gives you the ability to edit web server configuration files. I consider it a must have feature, unless you use Managed Wordpress Hosting, because with Managed Wordpress Hosting plans, web servers are already optimized for Wordpress websites. I also suggest that you get control panel with VPS plan, because it makes managing your server a lot easier. Two widely used control panels are cPanel and Plesk, but few others may be used as well.
Another factor to consider when you choose web hosting is an e-mail service. Some web hosts include e-mail with hosting plan and some do not. If you want to send e-mails to your readers from your website, then you would need e-mail service included with hosting plan. Your other option is to use third party service to send e-mails. Also please note that hosting plan could have a limit on the number of e-mails that you can send a day from your website.
Another very important factor to consider is uptime. Uptime is the time when web server is up and running and your website is online and you want it to be as close to 100% as possible, so it is very important to get web host with very good uptime.
3. Managed Wordpress Hosting.
It is hosting that is optimized for Wordpress websites. It is more expensive than regular shared hosting, but managed Wordpress hosting has many advantages. This type of hosting make it very easy to install and update Wordpress websites. These hosting plans come with their own caching plugins, performance enhancements, security features and automatic daily backups.
These web hosts limit plugins, that you can use, to avoid conflict with features, they include with hosting plans, so make sure to check the list of plugins, the web host would not allow. If you have Wordpress website and you want to do as little website and web server administration as possible, it is very good choice, but look at the number of websites, disk space and web traffic included with web hosting plan. Again, check that e-mail service is included with hosting plan, if you want to send e-mails from your website, though third party e-mail service is often a better choice.
4. Cloud or Cloud VPS hosting.
Cloud VPS is similar to regular VPS hosting, but with some important differences. With VPS there are few virtual machines installed on one web server and with Cloud VPS, virtual machines are installed on the cluster of web servers. It gives enhanced stability and performance and many of these plans are scaleable, so you can get more server's resources, if you need it, though typically you would pay more for that extra usage.
5. Dedicated Server.
With dedicated web server you get the whole server to yourself. It is more expensive option, but the most secure one and the one that gives you total control over web server. It also requires skills from server administrator. It is not something that I would recommend for beginners, but if you are up to the task that can be very good option. If you have website with a lot of traffic and stability and performance is very important to you, you can get cluster of dedicated servers. In case you wonder what cluster is: it is few or many servers connected together to improve performance and stability, and also provide much better protection against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks. If you choose a dedicated server, you may want to consider, if you want to have that server at data center or you want it at home or at the place of your business. If you decide to have dedicated web server at home or at your business, you would need a computer and fast business internet with static IP address.
Usually you would have a choice between your cable company and phone company. In my case, it is the choice between Comcast Business Internet and Verizon FIOS. As far as the service goes, I like the Comcast much better, while with Verizon FIOS I had problems with static IP address and static IP address is a must for web server. On the other hand Comcast requires 2-year contract for business internet and Verizon FIOS does not.
Overall, I would recommend VPS hosting for majority of websites. It is good middle ground between cheap Shared Hosting and more expensive Dedicated Server. If you have Wordpress website, you may also want to consider Managed Wordpress Hosting, as it is fully optimized for Wordpress websites.