Introduction
If you want to create a website and you know that you need web hosting. If you search around you will see that companies are selling shared hosting, workplace hosting, cloud hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), server clusters, dedicated servers... Some of these are managed, some of these are unmanaged, and the prices differ greatly. It can be complicated so I will explain web hosting differences in a clear way so you can make a good decision when you choose your web hosting services. The very first thing that I feel is very important and I want to mention first is that, if you're looking for web hosting don't limit yourself to the same company. Always look for companies that specialize in different technologies. For example if you're needs require shared hosting then look for companies that specialize in shared hosting. If you're looking for a VPS you need companies that specialize in VPS.
Shared Hosting
Imagine one tall building... let's call it ACME Shared Hosting Condo's. It has 300 rooms inside of it. Every room has a person living in it with their own personal goals but all rooms share the same electricity bill the same lift and the same water supply. The benefit is that you can live in the nice big building that has everything taking care for you you just pay rent but essentially you're splitting the bill with 300 other people and all of you get an affordable place to live. This is exactly how shared web hosting works. You get a smaller piece of a bigger server and every user on that server shares resources. You can get good shared web hosting plans from one dollar to around four dollars a month. If you expect no more than 20 to 30 people per hour on your website you should be fine. Much of the performance of the server is determined by its operating system, with the best performance being on OpenBSD. Vultr is our choice for everything that is possible in the cloud. Vultr.com even has a free tier incase you just want to dabble a bit or get your feet wet in the cloud vapors while testing out your setup. There are some downsides however, for example every single user on the server is sharing the exact same IP address so if you're sending emails every single user is sending emails from the same address....let's say just 5 of the 300 people start spamming... that means everyone's gonna suffer and everyone's emails goes to spam even if you didn't do anything because as far as google is concerned you're all guilty. There's another big downside if you want to scale your website resources for a limited time shared web hosting isn't really scalable, so it could cost you three or four times the regular cost if you want to scale it up. If I go back to the housing analogy, imagine you want to get two rooms because your friend is visiting for the weekend but the landlord says well there's a one room per person limit if you want to get two rooms you need to move to another building where everyone gets two rooms. You try to explain that you only need the extra space for two days, but he won't listen. I recommend shared web hosting to people that just need a simple website to be on the internet. If you are not planning to build a store, and you're not sending out emails, or you're not building a community...you just need for something to be online where people can come visit take a look and then leave. You can think of it exactly like your room you can have 100 people visit you in one day if they come and go but most likely if all 100 try to fit in at once, you'll have some issues. Or if you try running an actual store from your room there would be lines all across your hallway everyone will be bumping into each other everyone's knocking over your products stuff is breaking all around..it's chaos!
VPS Hosting
If shared hosting is one building with 300 rooms in it VPS hosting would be a piece of land...let's call it vps land. Divided into 300 pieces, you're still sharing the piece of land with other people but you have much more control over what's going on on it. Because you're only getting a piece of land you can build your website as small or as big as you want while you couldn't build a shopping mall inside your room you can definitely build one using a virtual private server. The way a virtual private server works is instead of getting a preset amount of resources that you can't really change, you get to choose how many resources you want and you can even change that number while your website is already running! Going back to the housing analogy with a VPS one person could be taking up 50 pieces of land for a shopping mall. Another one could have 10 pieces of land for a museum and another one could have four pieces of land for a house. Everyone doesn't have to be equal here like with shared hosting. At this point I hope everything is a little bit more clear and you're starting to understand the topic of web hosting more. Now I want to touch on another very important subject... the vps is actually split into two categories, managed vps, where you get a lot of help setting everything up, and unmanaged vps, where you basically have to do everything yourself. Back to our housing analogy... imagine you bought one piece of VPS land and you want to build your house. If you get managed VPS then the VPS land owner would give you contacts of the construction company he would also make sure that the internet, heat, electricity and water is taken care of. Once your house is built and he would even give you various tools and contacts if needed or even help you out himself. If your house requires that if you buy unmanaged VPS you would get anything but the piece of land. You would need to do everything yourself and buy your own tools build your house do the plumbing install all of the essentials.. basically you bought the land, you do what you want with it, but you won't get any help. That's why I always recommend buying managed vps even if you are tech savvy because yeah sure it's a little bit more expensive, but not by that much to be honest, and it's gonna save you a lot of time. In my opinion managed vps is actually the best way to host your website and it can be as cheap as 10 dollars per month.
Cloud Hosting
Finally we have cloud hosting which is actually really similar to VPS... to a point where people even confuse the two. There's one major difference: while a virtual private server takes resources from just one server, cloud VPS actually pulls resources from multiple servers. A good way to explain this would be if you're using a virtual private server and one component in that server breaks everything goes offline because it's taking resources from just one server but cloud hosting is actually pulling resources from different computers, so if one component breaks it just replaces that with a component from another computer. It's much more reliable. Imagine if you have one home but electricity to your home is provided from 10 different available sources. When one fails it just switches to another one and this way you always have electricity.
This article was originally published at Micro Rodeo and is being used with the author's permission.