What is Colocation Web Hosting

Colocation Web Hosting provides ultimate control and flexibility to the customer who purchases the physical server (or servers). The hosting provider keeps the server in their premises (called data center) and takes care of it. Here the maintenance may only be limited to providing electricity, internet connection, storage facility, physical security and protection system against natural disaster. The customer should  be able to access the server physically at any time and perform any type of maintenance or upgrade.

Pros:

• Extreme flexibility. Most powerful web hosting service.
• Companies can focus on their core business while letting the web host take care of the security, power, temperature maintenance, internet connection of their important equipments including web servers, mail servers etc.
• Depending on the business saves time and money over long run
• Some colocation centers feature a facility where the different carriers residing in the center can efficiently exchange data

Cons:

• High monthly service cost

Ideal for:

• Large mission-critical enterprises who need a safe environment for their equipment
• Large web companies who need custom resources and huge bandwidth to handle enormous traffic

Dedicated Web Hosting

When your website is very large or extremely resource-consuming then shared web host and VPS are not enough. You must upgrade to a dedicated web hosting where an entire physical server system is rented to a single customer. That means significantly more resources i..e. CPU, memory, disk space, bandwidth are dedicated to the business of one customer.

With great power comes great responsibility -- unlike the shared hosting the customer has to maintain the dedicated server (un-managed hosting) unless the customer pays extra bucks to the hosting provider for maintenance (managed hosting). If you are a technically knowledgeable enough to maintain the entire server or have a system administrator to do that job then go for un-managed dedicated server. In this case the provider may just give you a server with just the operating system, possibly containing a control panel. It is your responsibility to take care of all upgrades, patches, configuration, security, and bug fixing. On the other hand if you are not tech-savvy or don't want to hire a system administrator then pay the hosting provider to do all the server administration tasks, provided the web hosting company offers thus type of maintenance service. A managed hosting service can be significantly costlier than the un-manager hosting, but it may be worth the extra cost depending on your situation.

Note that unlike the colocation web hosting, here the dedicated server system is owned by the hosting company, not the customer who is just renting it for a fee.

Pros:
      This is a no-brainer. 

•  The complete server machine is at your disposal, so you can choose the operating system, install or uninstall any software you like, reboot at your will, host as many website as you like.
• More bandwidth, more RAM, more storage space, more computing power

 Cons:

• higher cost
• As described earlier you have to have solid technical knowledge to operate and administer the system.

Recommended to:

• Mission-critical business 
• website containing a lot of multi-media components e.g. videos
• gaming websites
  

What is Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server is a bridge between the shared hosting and dedicated hosting. That means the users can get the same (almost) benefits of having a dedicated server system for their website without bearing the high cost of dedicated hosting.

In dedicated hosting you get a complete server system dedicated for your websites giving you very high level of control and processing power. In last few years many sophisticated virtualization software came into the market. That enabled the hosting providers to partition a single system into multiple virtual system each having its own operating system, disk space and memory. With a VPS users get a single partition or virtual system of a high power machine, so users can install /uninstall any software in their partition, reboot their partition at will.

Pros:

• One big advantage over the shared web hosting is that you don't have to share IP addresses with other unknown sites. In shared hosting you share the same operating system as well as its IP address with a lot of other websites. God knows which types of websites those are. If one of them is bad enough to get penalized, then search engines can punish all the websites running on that IP address. With VPS you will not run that risk. 
• As I said earlier, the user has the ability to install / uninstall any software in its own virtual server and reboot it at any time. Let us say you want to build your website with a special database server you are comfortable with. If shared hosting provide do not support that database then your hands are tied, but in VPS you can easily install that database in your private server.
• Price is not too high compared to the shared web hosting. If you pay 10 bucks per month for shared hosting, chances are you can pay 15 extra bucks for a virtual server to get significantly more benefits.

Cons:

• User has to manage the virtual server, so to deal with it you need to have more technical skills or have to hire somebody 

Recommended To:

• A small / mid size business
• Web sites with high multimedia content e.g. videos, games
• If a website has a chance to receive occasional super-high traffic then you need a VPS or dedicated server to support that, otherwise a lot of customers will be left unhappy

It is very important to choose a VPS provider with a very good customer service. A few recommendations --

• Host Gator -- unparalleled customer service. As of now they allow you to choose from 9 different levels of VPS. So far I didn't  see that much flexibility anywhere else. (Use coupon code INIT082010 to get $9.94 off the first month's package price)
• InMotion
• Liquid Web  

What is Shared Web Hosting

For a beginner Shared Web Hosting typically is THE preferred way to start the adventure. This is the most popular of all types of hosting services. The provider of the shared web host stores multiple websites in the same machine, so all these websites on the shared server use the same network connection, the same hardware resources, and the same software. You are only responsible for managing the design and content of your website.

A shared web hosting can be name-based (domains of all shared websites map to the same IP address, but different host names) or dedicated IP-based (each website gets a separate IP address).

Pros:

• cheap cheap cheap. Many popular providers offer a shared service for around $10 per month. That is also for a reasonably good service -- ample bandwidth, disk space, control panel.
• Shared web hosting hits a sweet spot between price and service. It is more than sufficient for most of the websites.
• You don't need almost any technical knowledge work in a shared host environment

Cons:

• Limited resources are available because of the shared nature of the service. Providers promise to give unlimited bandwidth, storage, but that is just a marketing gimmick. Also there are restrictions on the type of scripts you can run on the server.
• You cannot get "root" privilege of the server
• Sometimes the web hosts do not support Secure HTTP transaction (through HTTPS). Some of them require you to get unique IP address to get this done.

Recommended to:

• This is perfect for beginners. That is true for both personal and small business websites. Even if you suspect that over the years your personal website may transform to a giant, still it is better to start with shared web hosting to cut the cost and test the market.
• Company brochure or profile
• Basic e-commerce, Bulletin board or small chat room
• Small and medium sized businesses

Which web host is the best for shared hosting:

Most of the popular web hosts belong to this category. As far as price and resources they offer, there is virtually no difference. Some of them provide more resources which you are unlikely to use. The key to choose the best shared web host or at least one of the best hosting providers is to look for the one that is known for high reliability (uptime etc.) and better customer service. A few of them are given below.

• Host Gator (Use coupon code INIT082010 to get $9.94 off the package price)
• Blue Host
• iPage
• Just Host 

Free Web Hosting

Why would somebody provide free web hosting service? What do they gain? Actually there are a lot of companies who offer free limited web hosting in exchange of displaying advertisement on the website. Although it looks very enticing, free hosting has a lot of drawbacks and it is not recommended for any serious website.

Pros:

• It has the magic word associated with it --- FREE

Cons:

•  It may not be totally free. The hosting provider may have hidden catch in its terms and conditions.
• It may be free for an year or a few months. After that the provider may charge higher than standard fee.
• Even though the service it totally free and there is no catch, still it may not be enough for you due to the limited nature of the service. Suppose you want to work with a particular development package, but it may not have support for it.
• The hosting providers aggressively insert advertisement in the websites they host. You have no control on the quality of the advertisement. That may drive away traffic from your site.
• Typically their servers have poor up-time.
• Support / help is non-existing

Recommended to:

Free web hosting is not recommended to anybody, even beginners. Only if you plan to run a personal website for a few months without any intention of extending it in future, then you can consider a free web host.

What is a Web Host

The term hosting is generically used to describe a variety of services necessary to support a web site.

When we request for a page of an website the request is served by a software called "Web Server" running in a remote location. It may also require a database like MS SQL server to retrieve the various information related to the website. A web hosting provider or web host is a company that hosts all these resources (both software and hardware) required for the website.

The computer running the web server can be owned by the site-owner or by the hosting company (provider), but it must reside physically in the premises of the hosting company and must use provider's internet connection.

The scope of hosting services varies widely. As I told before, it must provide a web server at minimum and preferably database support. Now-a-days most of the hosting packages comes with a lot more e.g. application development platform (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python etc.), support for Content Management System (CMS) e.g. Joomla, a control panel to manage the web server. More about these features will be discussed in the future posts.

Based on the service levels the web hosts can be categorized in following groups --

• Free Web Hosting
• Shared Web Hosting
• Virtual Private Server (VPS)
• Dedicated Hosting Service
• Managed Web Hosting
• Colocation Hosting Service
• Reseller Web Hosting
• In the Cloud

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