What are the main types of web hosting?
As a business seeking quality hosting, you should expect to pay anywhere from $250-$1500 per year.
Shared, Dedicated, Cloud, and VPS are the main types of web hosting.With these, Managed vs. Unmanaged website hosting is worth consideration.
- Shared-Budget friendly, good for getting started online, individual websites or small businesses. It’s the hosting equivalent of living in an apartment building. You share web utilities (CPU, RAM, and Disk Space) with other residents. It’s easy and affordable with minimal maintenance, but you can have “bad neighbors” that may have a big traffic uptick, which slows down it’s “neighbors”.
- Dedicated-Expensive, for bigger businesses or high-security need websites. It’s the hosting equivalent to owning your own house and plot of land, everything is yours. You get absolute control with no resource competition. It does require manual intervention for hardware updates that can incur downtime periodically.
- Cloud-Flexible pricing as you grow, for SaaS startups, high-traffic news sites and apps with unpredictable traffic patterns. It’s the hosting equivalent of having multiple properties you can utilize. AWS, Google Cloud, etc offer this and they utilize a massive network of virtual servers. If one goes down, another one comes up. It has near-perfect uptime and great scalability, but setup is complex and likely needs a DevOps professional.
- VPS-A middle ground budget option, good for ecommerce, growing businesses and custom web applications. It’s the hosting equivalent of living in a condo. You share a building like an apartment, buty ou have your own dedicated walls and resources that no one can touch. You get guaranteed resources, root access for customization, and better security. However, it requires more technical knowledge.
Managed vs Unmanaged-Which is best for you? The easiest way to decide is if you want to handle hosting your website, or if you want someone to do it for you. Managed is great for business owners, where the hosting provider handles security patches, backups, updates, etc. to keep your site up and running with minimal hassle. Unmanaged is great for developers who want a blank slate, and can set up everything themselves. Or someone that just wants to save money and figure it out on their own, even thought it requires a lot of time.
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