Web Hosting for Dummies: What is Web Hosting?!

Posted: July 1, 2007 at 2:18 pm | (3) Comments

Web hosting is a pretty vague term because there are plenty of web hosting types out there, ranging from Shared Web Hosting up to Clustered Web Hosting, I will be explaining all of these in this article.

Shared Web Hosting

This probably is the most popular type of web hosting on the internet. Shared web hosting means you and other people share the same server and are hsoted on the same server. Usually, there is a control panel such as cPanel that helps you manage your email and other features such as MySQL. This is the most common type of web hosting purchased by people who run their own small blog or a small business.

Reseller Web Hosting

This type of web hosting is less popular compared to Shared Web Hosting. Reseller web hosting is a special type of account that comes with a special control panel which generally is WHM and the difference is that Reseller Web Hosting gives you the ability to give away shared web hosting. Typically, start up web hosting companies get Reseller web hosting so that they can offer Shared Web Hosting.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Servers are pretty common for people who have out grown the resources of Shared web hosting but do not want to pay yet the high prices of dedicated servers. Virtual Private Servers are virtual machines located on dedicated servers; it’s like dividing the server into small servers. However; the Virtual Private Servers are not shared, you have your own operating system, your own kernel. It’s a complete dedicated server environment.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are a bit less popular due to their high prices however they are usually used by very high traffic websites or web hosting companies who would like to have their own servers instead of working on Reseller Web Hosting. Usually the servers are leased with a specific bandwidth allotment and when purchasing, you usually choose the server’s specifications (RAM, HDD, CPU)

Colocation

Colocation is pretty close to Dedicated Servers; however, the colocation provider only does provide you with bandwidth, space & power for your server. You have to purchase your own server and send it to the colocation provider. The colocation provider has nothing to do with your server and generally colocation is not recommended unless it’s a local datacenter because of the high costs of repairs.

Clustered Hosting

This most probably is the least used web hosting solution as it comes at a high price and is for high usage sites. They usually have multiple servers and each server would get a specific role, one server could serve all the HTTP traffic and one would manage all the MySQL traffic. Usually; this is a custom solution and it is not sold as packages on the internet.

This article pretty much sums up all the types of web hosting out there, stick around for more articles about web hosting, make sure to subscribe to this blog!

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