If you’ve been spending much time on web hosting sites, you’ve probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent different types of web hosting, but not every web host offers them. In addition, these hosting types differ from each other to a large extent.
Almost every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest form of web hosting. Your website shares a server and server resources with many other websites with shared hosting. Shared hosting is the way to go if you want to keep your web hosting budget small and don’t expect much traffic. You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting. However, this level of hosting is best suited for smaller websites that don’t require a lot of bandwidth. Since you are sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for occasional slowdowns if one of your site partners starts attracting many visitors. If you’re on a tight budget, you can use free web hosting, but it has its caveats (usually advertising and extremely low server specs).
Larger businesses that expect high website traffic should choose VPS or dedicated hosting, each offering increasingly powerful server specifications. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that there are far fewer websites sharing server resources and the resources are more segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less than $100 per month.
Dedicated hosting puts your website on a separate server so that it can utilize the full power of the server. This is the most expensive type of hosting; you may end up paying $100 or more per month for this raw power.
Reseller hosting lets you start your own branded web hosting business without worrying about building an infrastructure from scratch. WordPress hosting lets you build a website in an environment that caters to the world’s most popular content management systems. And what about cloud hosting? It’s a completely different beast that allows you to easily scale the power of your website across multiple servers, although not every web host offers it. Yet. The pricing for each hosting tier is different, so it’s crucial to shop around.
