Web Hosting
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: An overview of web hosting
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-14
Last Updated: 2007-03-08
Hosting Prices & Options
Broadly, you can separate web hosting into three main levels. There are shared hosts, virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated hosting.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the least expensive and the most risky of the options. Under this model a single computer serves or hosts many websites (conceivably hundreds if not thousands). If something happens to the computer then all the sites go down. If one of the sites runs a bad program it is possible that all the sites will be affected. If one of the sites experiences a huge surge in traffic then all the sites could be slowed. Now there are all kinds of sophisticated methods of limiting these problems and shared hosting can be quite reliable but the bottom line is every web site on the host is going to succeed or fail with the rest of them.
Shared hosting can range in price from "free" up to $50 a month or more and there are hosts that serve almost any programming language or application you can think of in a shared hosting environment. Reliable hosting can be found in the $10/month or less range depending on your needs and it is hard to recommend going for anything much cheaper unless you are very sure it is a quality service. If your web presence isn't worth $120/year then it probably isn't worth the time spent building it.
Virtual Private Servers
The next level of service has recently become much more popular and is quickly replacing shared hosting for certain classes of customer. A VPS is identical to a shared host with one important exception. The computer hosts operating systems instead of websites. So one physical box will serve 10 or more complete installations of Linux, each one entirely separate from the other. The benefit is twofold: First, another website's high traffic or bad programming won't affect you at all. The worst they can do (theoretically) is crash their own operating system. Second, since you have complete access to the operating system you can install any programming application you like and aren't limited to the choices offered by the shared host.
A VPS can cost between $20 and $100 per month or more depending on bandwidth, storage and pre-installed applications. This is a very, very good option if you have custom requirements or need a high-level control over your environment.
In fact for all but the simplest websites, it might be the best option available.
Dedicated Hosting
Often called co-location, dedicated hosting is your own physical computer running at a web host's location. You benefit from their IT setup (firewall, expensive routers, access to the backbone of the internet, secured server room with fire suppression technology, backup options, etc, etc) and a variable degree of IT support.
Dedicated hosting is rarely a good option for a company without their own in-house technology team. It is expensive and very labor intensive. The benefit is complete control and no nagging worries about being impacted by other users of the server.
Quality, dedicated hosting will cost more than $200 per month not counting the price of the hardware, software and configuration.
Summary
1) Work with your web developer when choosing hosting. They can best advise you on the environment best suited to run your application.
2) Don't skimp too much on the web host.
3) Be sure to inform your web developer of ALL your internet requirements including email and anything else.
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