Nowadays, there are so many choices when it comes to web hosting. The cost also varies a lot depending on the type of plan you are planning to get. Here is a brief explanation of the different types of hosting available. I will begin with the least expensive to the most expensive. Free Web Hosting Some companies offers free web hosting. One of the most famous is Geocities which is managed by Yahoo. Though they are free, there are usually a lot of restrictions limiting what you can do with it. The providers usually offers very small disk space (less than 100 megabytes), small bandwidth (less than 5GB per month), no database allowed such as mysql or msaccess and restricted email/FTP access. You might be asking why would a company offer such a free service since it will cost them money to host your website? The answer lies in advertising. They will place a banner on your website in exchange, you get free web hosting. There are also some web hosts who require you to sign up some other services such as registering or renewing a domain name with them before qualifying for it. I would recommend if you are putting a personal website or a new webmaster, then use it just to play around and learn. Other than that, it is advisable to get a better plan once you become more familiar with it. Shared Web hosting Shared Web Hosting means your website is placed on the same server as possibly several hundreds of other websites. It allows you to have more than 1 website per shared hosting account. The cost is pretty cheap usually costly less than ten dollars each month. They have fewer restrictions than free web hosts. Due to the fact that hundreds of websites could be residing on the same server, a server crash could bring all the sites down. In many instances, some webmasters run high resource intensive applications on shared accounts. This causes the server to be sluggish and slow affecting the performance of all websites on the same server. I do still recommend getting a shared web hosting account for small business web owners and websites which are still new and do not have a lot of traffic. Once you feel the website is more established and getting more visitors, you can always move to a higher plan. Reseller Web Hosting Reseller Web Hosting is similar to shared hosting in that you obtain a fixed amount of disk space and bandwidth from the hosting company and can accommodate more than one website. It allows you to resell web hosting plans to your own customers. The difference is you get to decide how to divide the diskspace and bandwidth for each plan you offer. Cost wise, it is usually about the same as shared web hosting. |
