What to Expect from a Web Hosting Service

There are a variety of web hosting service options which companies and individuals may choose from, in fact the choices are sometimes overwhelming.

But the fact is that by owning your own hosted website, you can take orders for your products and services you offer or provide a space where people can comment on your blogs (publisher), sell advertising, generate leads, whatever the case may be, the list goes on and on.

Different Web Hosting Service Packages

Free

Web Hosting services that are free- these types of service are given by a variety of companies offering a web hosting service which is limited and sponsored by different ad companies.  These services have more limitations than the websites that are paid.

You also have very limited control over your website on these free hosting options. Your disc space and bandwidth are severely limited, your website may have ads placed on then and you will have no recourse, and your site may be deleted without advanced notice, and you will have no recourse.

Reseller

Web hosting resellers-these let clients participate as hosts. Resellers can be an individual domain and function under any of the different hosting types depending on what extent they are able to extent.  This  is a good for web developers or online marketers who add value to general hosting plans.

Website flippers can partition the hosting space they have been allocated, and then resell them to the buyers of the websites they flipped for profit. This is indeed a great business model and provides for them a very nice additional income.

Hosting clients can use reseller hosting plans for the SEO advantage it provides them. If a webmaster creates a number of websites and places each on a different partition he created, he would be able to interlink the websites and so generate valuable link juice since each site would have a different IP address.

  • Server uptime guarantee – In most cases a good web host will guarantee server uptime of 99%, and some will even guarantee an uptime of 99.9%. This is a very critical aspect in web hosting since it will allow a website to grant access to the customers and clients at all times. A website that frequently goes down will lose customers and clients, and in the end will negatively impact the revenue generated by the business.
  • Bandwidth and Storage Allocation – This is unlimited in some plans while in others the specific limitations are stated for each hosting plan.
  • Customer Service – This is yet another critical aspect of web hosting. The state of the art customer service will provide 24/7/365 coverage for hosting clients. The support team will be reachable very easily by phone, chat and email.

Shared

Web hosting services that are shared will place your website(s) on the same server as other sites which could number in the hundreds or thousands, thus the server space is “shared”.

Usually, all the different types of domains do share one common server resource pool like a CPU or a RAM. The options you have under this kind of hosting plan will be varied, these are the most common web hosting services and one which most folks will purchase.

Managed

As a user of a managed hosting plan, you will get your own website server but do not have total control over it (which can be a good thing).

You are, however, allowed to control your data through remote management tools such as FTP (file transfer protocol). You are not allowed full control for the reason that your provider can then monitor the service and take care of the trouble shooting. You do not, in effect, own the server but rather, are just leasing it, and the web host does all the tech work — this is a win-win for small businesses.

Cloud

Cloud web hosting is a newer hosting service which allows you as the customer to utilize powerful, reliable and scalable hosting (scalable is the key here) which is based on utility billing, clustered servers and load-balanced.  The key feature is that you will never pay for more storage and bandwidth than you need because of the flexibility.

Dedicated

As the user of a dedicated server get your very own server and have total control over it. On the other hand, you do not own the server. Dedicated hosting plans include unmanaged or self-managed, as well as managed.

These are quite inexpensive types of hosting services and you usually have full access to the administrative box which means that you are in charge of the maintenance and security of your own website.  However, with “managed” hosting you don’t have to worry about that.  This is the King of the web host world, and the most expensive package.

VPS

VPS stands for virtual private server, this type of web hosting package involves a server that is partitioned in such a way that the user gets what “feels” like a dedicated server, but for a fraction of the cost.  The security and reliability are top notch, and again, you get a great monthly cost.

Home

Home Servers- these involve just one machine that is put in a residence (yours) which is private and can be utilized for hosting one or more sites from a broadband connection that is consumer-grade.

This may sound tempting, but it’s tough to manage unless you really know what you’re doing.  Security issues are a huge stumbling block.

There you have it, all of your web hosting service choices…this will help a lot of folks new to the industry narrow and focus.  Check out our top 10 web hosting picks for more information.

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