Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to
host your website on a web server. When your website goes live
on the web server, online users can then browse your website on
the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your
website is called web hosting providers.
A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to
thousands of websites. For example, the ‘Best Web Host of the
Year 2003' award winner, iPowerWeb, is a web hosting company
that hosts more than 200,000 websites. For that reason, a web
hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are
computers) to ‘store' the website. And all these web servers are
connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection
and housed in a physical building called ‘data center'. In order
to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully
operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7
environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control,
virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup
and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
What are the different types of web hosting? There are different
kinds of web hosting companies out there with different
characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized
into the following categories:
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many
websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers.
Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few
hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You
may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many
websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In
fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful
computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of
websites without any problem. But when the web server is
overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that
it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower
response from the web server.
However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will
constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will
add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the
benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is
shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory)
by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford
to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on
the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response
time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per
month.
Dedicated Hosting
In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a
specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a
dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the
customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites,
modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic
and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated
hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50
per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a
result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and
extremely important website.
Co-location hosting
In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting
providers and customers only rent the web server during the
hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns
the web server hardware and only housed their web server within
the web hosting provider's secure data center. In this way, the
customer has full control over their web server and
simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and
maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the
monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location
hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.
Reseller hosting
In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server
storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who
then resell the web server storage to their customers.
Typically, resellers are web consultants including web
designers, web developers, or system integration company who
resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their
other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to
50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the
web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its
own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in
other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the
Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).
To the reseller's customers, the reseller is the web host
provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down
and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond
directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the
communication process taken place between customer to reseller
and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and
forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve.
Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit
website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the
reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.
However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers
that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell
between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You
don't judge by the availability of toll-free number alone
because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers
with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical
support. When the reseller's customer calls the number for
technical support, the web host uses the reseller's name so the
customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller
directly. Likewise, don't be fooled by the professional designed
website alone because it is extremely easy to create a
professional looked business website nowadays.
In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting
price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web
hosting provider has solid company information such as
iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background,
offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not
have solid company background (here is just an example out of
thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers
is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers
when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb
quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 -
$10.
Therefore, you should not strive to find the lowest price web
hosting companies without first considering the quality of the
service and support provided. Don't expect to find any top-level
support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your
web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly
more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low
cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important
website. Look at our high quality and cheap
web hosting services review and recommendation here. |
