What are the differences between the different types of hosting? Which one is right for you? In this section, we’ll explore the various hosting types, who they’re ideal for and any pros or cons.

Free Hosting

Free hosting typically comes with a website that’s locked to a domain name you don’t control. With free hosting, you’re likely going to be stuck with http://yourchoice.realdomain.com (i.e. hostingrookie.wordpress.com) as opposed to http://www.hostingrookie.com. WordPress.com (the website, not the CMS), Blogspot.com and Tumblr.com are examples of free hosts.

While this type of domain name is ok for casual bloggers or sites that are “just for fun”, it’s messy, hard to remember and doesn’t really make sense if you’re trying to create a real business.

Ideal For: Those who are just looking to have a space to write their thoughts or post pictures for fun.

 

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Shared Hosting

With shared hosting, your website files are stored on the same server as other websites. Because the space is shared, shared hosting is much cheaper than other options.

Of course, shared space comes with some challenges; if your hosting neighbors are using up a lot of the server’s resources, YOUR site is going to slow down.

Ideal For: Websites that don’t have huge traffic demands, including most anyone looking to host their blog or even small online stores. This is the most common type of hosting.

 

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VPS Hosting

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is essentially the same as shared hosting, but with more available resources and security for each site on the server. You’re still sharing the server with other people, but not as many as shared hosting. It’s harder for the activity of other websites to disrupt your own.

If you exceed your limits with your shared hosting, you’ll almost always be moved to a VPS server.

Ideal For: It’s hard to generalize, but VPS servers are a more ideal solution for higher-traffic websites (more than 20,000 page views/month) and a lot of data demands (plugins, etc.)

 

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Cloud VPS Hosting

While it’s a little complicated, the best way to think of cloud hosting is many different servers all working together and acting like one big machine.

Your resources are scattered throughout a cluster of servers – so if one server goes down, another can pick up the slack. It makes the chances of downtime much, much lower.

With cloud hosting, all your hardware is redundant, so if there are any hardware issues, the system will migrate your instance to another node.

Ideal For: Serious businesses with heavy uptime demands and high-traffic websites.

Cloud hosting is normally a little more expensive than a standard VPS, but if you have the money, you should go with VPS Cloud system at around the 20,000 page views per month point.

 

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Dedicated Hosting

With dedicated hosting, you’ll have a server all to yourself: no noisy neighbors, no outside demands from other people’s websites. Chances are good that if you’re reading Hosting 101, you’re not the kind of person that needs a dedicated server.

Ideal For: Sites that need a huge amount of resources. Common types of sites using dedicated hosting include: media-heavy sites, social media sites, media outlets, big ecommerce sites and other corporate sites (i.e. eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).

 

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