Thread: How to Choose a Web Host

It is a jungle in the web hosting business world। There are thousands of web hosting companies competing for your business. Some are hobbyists running a server out of their basement and others are huge companies running thousands of servers. For the consumer it is not easy to determine which are good and which are not so good. It can often take some trial and error --- something that we would all like to avoid. So, here is the ultimate guide on the internet for choosing the right type of hosting and the right web hosting company the first time around.

1 Choosing the Right Type of Hosting
It is important to choose the right type of hosting for your needs. The hosting types presented below represent a range of web hosting. We start with the least expensive with Free Hosting and move through Virtual Private Server Hosting and Dedicated Hosting to get to the most expensive which is Managed Hosting. In addition, depending on your needs, Co-located Hosting or Reseller Hosting might be what you need so those options are discussed as well.

1.1 Free Hosting
Free Hosting is free. Many times free hosting is provided free as long as your website provides advertisement space to the hosting company. This type of hosting is very limited as to the options, services and support that you can expect to receive when compared to any of the other paid hosting services. Free hosting is best for small, personal websites. However, with the cost of shared hosting being extremely low, it should be considered as well for personal websites.

1.2 Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting is the least expensive form of paid web hosting. As the name implies, with shared hosting, many web sites are hosted on a single physical server. This is generally the most economical option for paid hosting as many people share the overall cost of the server, server administration and maintenance. Shared hosting is a great option for sites that are simple and have a small amount of traffic. Conversely, if your site requires a specific database, customized programming and/or has a large amount of traffic, then shared hosting will not work well.

1.3 Virtual Private Server Hosting
Virtual private servers (VPS) are a form of virtualization that splits a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. As a type of web hosting, virtual private servers fills the gap between shared hosting and the next level of hosting which is dedicated hosting.
Virtual private servers allow root-level access to individual clients without requiring physically dedicated servers. They are most widely used by businesses and individuals that need a customized solution that cannot be filled in a shared hosting environment.
Virtual private servers have also become popular for their ability to establish production and test sites. For example, a single physical server might have two virtual private servers. One server will be running the production or live website, and a second which will be running a copy of the live site. This setup allows software updates to be fully tested prior to making the software changes on the live site without requiring several physical servers.

1.4 Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is a type of web hosting where you rent an entire server and the server is not shared with anyone else. This is more flexible than shared hosting and virtual private server hosting, as you have full control over the server, including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. Server administration can usually be provided by the hosting company as an add-on service. This is an area that you will need to fully explore if you decide to use dedicated hosting as some hosting companies are limited in the administration services they provide and if you are not equipped to be an administrator, you could have problems.

1.5 Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is a type of dedicated hosting where you rent an entire server that is not shared with anyone and the hosting company manages the server for you. There are vast differences between how much management is provided between hosting companies. Some managed hosting companies do everything for you and they charge a high fee for this. Others do a minimal amount of work, like daily backups and applying security patches when you ask for them to be applied. Typically, though not always, the more you pay, the more you get. Here is a list of a variety of managed services. Some companies provide some of the services on this list others provide all services on this list.

* 24/7/365 Live, On-Site Technical Support
* Systems Administration Services
* Server Configuration Services
* Server Provisioning Services
* O/S Updates & Patches
* Server Anti-Virus Protection
* Server Load Balancing and Clustering Services
* Ping Monitoring
* Server Monitoring
* Network Monitoring
* System Utilization Monitoring
* Process Monitoring
* Network Based Intrusion Detection
* On-Demand Vulnerability Assessments
* Penetration Testing Service
* O/S Hardening Services
* Managed Firewall
* Complete Support for all Hardware with spares on site
* Managed Server Backup & Recovery
* Weekly Tape Rotation and Secure, Off-Site Data Storage
* Load/Stress Testing
* Application Performance Analysis and Review

For really large sites, a custom cluster of servers may be required to handle extremely large amounts of traffic.

1.6 Co-located Hosting
Co-located hosting is where you put your own server(s) into a co-location center. A co-location center (also called a "colo") is a type of data center where you get access to a secure data center with access to one or more internet backbones, redundant HVAC, power and fire suppression systems to provide a higher level of security, performance and system uptime. The advantage is that you get access and full control over your server(s), but you do not have to invest in the entire infrastructure. Therefore, there is minimal cost and complexity.
Increasingly organizations are recognizing the benefits of co-locating their web hosting equipment within a data center. Co-location is becoming popular because of the time and cost savings a company can realize as result of using shared data center infrastructure. In addition, by outsourcing network traffic to a co-location service provider with greater bandwidth capacity, web site access speeds can improve significantly.

1.7 Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting where the account owner splits up their allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to resell shared hosting. Resellers can split up a shared hosting account or can split up one or more dedicated servers. Often, resellers are web consultants, web designers or web developers who resell the shared hosting as an add-on service to complement their other services.
Resellers can receive 50 percent or more discount on the price of a reseller hosting account from the web hosting company. Resellers are also allowed to decide their own pricing structure and are able to sell web hosting plans under their own brand name.
Reseller hosting generally requires little knowledge of web hosting services in order to get started because resellers are generally not responsible for maintaining web server services or other maintenance related tasks. To the reseller's customers, the reseller is the web hosting company. However, in cases when technical problems occur, (for example, if the server goes down or the network connectivity to the server is down) the customer will call the owner of the dedicated server in which the reseller host is hosted for technical support.
Through control panels (see list below), reseller hosting is made simple and straight forward. Typically reseller programs offer one or more of the popular control panels.
Popular Control Panels List:

* DirectAdmin (Unix)
* Ensim Pro (Windows/Unix)
* Helm (Windows)
* Hosting Controller (Windows)
* H-Sphere (Windows/Unix)
* Plesk (Windows/Unix)
* Webmin (Unix)
* WHM/cPanel (Windows/Unix)