If you want to make an online presence for your business or company, you need two things at first. One, a suitable domain name and two is a web hosting company to host your domain. Now, you need to know what is domain and what is web hosting? Domain name is the web address of your website or blog. To host this domain address, you need a hosting service. In other words, you will have to rent some space in the web where you can store your domain and the other stuff of your website, this is called hosting. Although, it is possible to run your web address from your personal computer, but it is not a practical idea to do so. Because, a lot of outside user will browse your website at the same time. Which may require a very high internet speed with a very high bandwidth. This is why you need a reliable web hosting company.
From Where You Can Get the Hosting Service?
You can get web hosting service from any online web hosting companies. There are a lot of web hosting companies around the web who rent you the space in the world of internet. Web hosting companies have those high power web servers which are capable of handle a large traffic and can store your website and materials of your website.
What Kind of Hosting is Provided by the Web Hosting Companies?
There are mainly four types of hosting named as shared server hosting , dedicated server hosting, VPS hosting and cloud server hosting.
Shared Server Hosting:
In shared server hosting, the server is shared by many website on the web. The server is not dedicated for one single website. Rather a group of websites share the server and the hosting company rent you a specific space in that server. If you compare it with a flat with a server, then in shared server hosting the hosting company only rent you one room and you share the flat with other websites. For small blogs or websites, where the the traffic is not that huge and the material of the websites are not that huge, shared server hosting is a good option. When I started my website, I bought the shared hosting (my blog is using shared hosting, you can check here about the hosting company I use) as it is a small blog in WordPress. Shared server is more than enough to handle the traffic. Shared hosting plan is affordable for a small blogger or small online business owner. If you have a small business and you want to feature it online then go for the shared hosting plan and build your website.
You can read the article about which hosting plan is suitable for a small WordPress blog.
Dedicated Server Hosting:
In dedicated server hosting, the hosting company allows you to rent the entire server. This server enhances the performance of the website and also increase the speed of the website. You can control the server and can make any changes if you want. This hosting plan is quite expensive and is complicated to handle. You need technical skill to control dedicated server hosting.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting:
In virtual private server hosting concept, you can own an entire server virtually. Which means that you have the server level control and you can control the server the way you want but you are also sharing the physical server with other. As in this kind of server, your website is also sharing the resources with other website, though you have server level control, your website may get affected by the performance of the other website. You can read more about VPS Hosting in the article What Kind Of Web Hosting Right For You?
Cloud Hosting:
In all the above mentioned hosting (shared, dedicated and VPS) there are certain physical limitation. Also there is a limit to the number of traffic it can control. The above kinds are okay with the website where the traffic limit has some practical physical limitation. But form some website the traffic is really high each and every day and you cannot predict it. From those kind of website, cloud hosting facility if provided. In cloud hosting, unlike one server, several servers are grouped together to provide collective resources to the websites running on those servers.
Hey Himadri,
Good explanation. In my opinion for beginners without much traffic shared hosting is great, because it is economical.
Thanks for your complement Pravin. Yes, you are right, beginners without huge traffic can use shared hosting.