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The technological progress has moved on forward leaps and bounds lately, with the Internet being successfully propelled forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products. It is becoming increasingly clear to many people that having a web presence is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. The web page is king since it gives anyone an opportunity to reach millions of people all over the world. Thousands of web sites are launched daily, and all of them need to be hosted with a web hosting provider to make their presence on the Internet.

Web hosting can be defined as a service that hosts your website, making it accessible to the users who want to know what you have to say or sell. Web hosting companies provide you with a certain amount of space and bandwidth on their servers enabling you to maintain a website and make it available to visitors.

Major Types of Web Hosting Solutions

If you have made up your mind to launch a website, you risk drowning in the ocean of web hosting solutions available. Should you stick to a dedicated or a shared web server? Is Windows-based hosting better than Linux-based? Would you go for free or paid hosting? Which hosting provider will offer you the best value for money?

For a beginner, all these questions can be quite confusing. The choice of web hosting for your website is critical, so it’s in your best interest to pick a good hosting provider from the start.

On the one hand, if you decide on a web hosting type that is too powerful for your website, you will get into unnecessary expenses. On the other hand, a web hosting solution that fails to keep pace with your traffic or requirements would prevent your website from becoming a success.

Thus, it pays to thoroughly understand the features of major web hosting types available on the World Wide Web:

Free Web Hosting

There is a multitude of website hosting companies that allow users to post their web pages in the Internet for free. Free web hosting would be a great choice for beginners who are not quite sure what type of website they will eventually need. Generally, the major disadvantages of this type of web hosting are limited bandwidth, ad placement, small website size, and subdomain instead of a regular domain name.

Home Web Hosting

Some people, who find it tough to stomach the thought of paying the monthly fee to a web hosting provider for the rest of their website life, prefer the option of self hosting their websites. Home web hosting is certainly a cheap solution because as soon as your servers are set up they will be working for you for an indefinite period of time. All you need to do is designate your home PC as your server and have it connected to the Internet. However, it is essential to ask your Internet Service provider if you are allowed to set up your own server since many providers may block home servers.

Disadvantages of a home-based web server are a necessity to keep it up all the times, recovering it from emergencies such as power or Internet connection shutdowns, and taking care of IP address changes in situations when you don't have a static IP.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting (also known as virtual hosting) is the most commonly used type of web hosting solution where multiple websites are hosted on a single server and have their own "slice" of server space, CPU power, and bandwidth. This type of hosting allows a hosting company to kill two birds with one stone: make the most of their servers and lower the cost for their customers. Although multiple websites are accommodated on the same server, shared hosting users do not have access to each other's sites. Users can manage their websites through a Web-based control panel or a content management system (CMS). Typically, a shared hosting plan offers a wide choice of features needed for a website, but its biggest limitation is that your website will inevitably slow down in case other websites start getting more traffic or using a great deal of the shared resources.

Dedicated Server

Web hosting on a dedicated server means that your website has exclusive access to all server resources without the need to share them with other websites or applications. This expensive web hosting solution would be perfect for large websites with heavy traffic which can no longer put up with the disadvantages of shared web hosting. Most dedicated hosting providers offer unlimited databases, as many email addresses as needed, and ample bandwidth.

Co-located Web Hosting

Once you have signed up with a collocated web hosting provider, you become the owner of the server which hosts your website. This gives you the right to choose components, platform, and software according to your needs. Although co-located web hosting is more expensive than dedicated web hosting, it usually offers no support for the server.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a relatively new web hosting option where you only have to pay for the amount of traffic and computing resources you have used. This is a perfect solution for those webmasters who require more resources, but have a limited budget.

Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

It is not enough to know the difference between major webhosting types to identify which one would be the best solution for you. One should also understand all the web hosting features that may be required for your website for making the right decision.

However, if you have neither the time nor the desire to delve into the intricacies of web hosting, or all those IT terms are causing you a headache, or you just want your website up and running quickly without much investment capital, then you definitely need a hosting package with a good CMS that will allow you to build and manage your website stress-free.

Many web hosts include CMS into their hosting packages. However, note that most of them do not provide the support for your CMS. Each time you have some issues to solve you will have to resort to the help of your CMS’ home site. Ideally, you should find a web hosting company with its own CMS like Anuko, which would keep things simple for you.