What type of hosting is best suited to your needs? With so many options and features offered by hosting companies, it can be difficult to know where to start, and beginners are likely to feel overwhelmed. Basically, depending on the type of site that you want or have, different hosting options will be best for you.

Personal or Small Business Sites

If you are running a personal or small business site, virtual hosting or free hosting are the best options for you, as you will probably not need a huge amount of bandwidth or storage space. Virtual hosting is when you rent a quantity of space on a shared server owned by your hosting company. This is reasonably inexpensive (costing about £70/year or less) and will offer most of the options and features that you will need. Your bandwidth and storage space are limited, but this shouldn’t be a problem if your site is quite small and does not receive too much traffic.

Free hosting might also be an option, especially for personal sites. Some companies, like Geocities, will give you a webpage on their site in exchange for being able to put advertising on your homepage, often in the form of a banner along the top. Often, free hosting sites will offer all sorts of easy-to-use options for building a site of a few pages using the templates they provide. Free hosting is probably not suitable for a business, however, firstly because of this irritating advertising, and secondly because the address will be something like http://www.freewebhosting.com/yoursite.html, which looks unprofessional and shows everyone that you haven’t paid for your own hosting or domain name.

E-Commerce Sites

If you are offering goods for sale on your site, your site will be more complex and will probably need to handle more traffic. In this case, you will definitely need at least virtual hosting (free hosting is certainly not an option), and you may decide to go for co-location or a dedicated server. Co-location is a type of hosting where your own server equipment is located in a secure, state-of-the-art facility where rooms are temperature controlled and carefully monitored. If you go for this, you will have to make a large investment because you have to own your own server equipment. Dedicated hosting might be a better option if your company is unable to bear the cost of buying this kind of equipment outright. With dedicated hosting, you rent an entire server from your host company, which holds your site and your site alone. As with having your own server equipment, dedicated hosting offers a high degree of control, high bandwidth and storage, and you can choose a host company which offers good support as well, to help you with any difficulties you may experience (at a cost).

Information Sites

Information sites are often vast and handle an extremely high degree of traffic. They would therefore almost always require co-location or dedicated server hosting.

Author: Natalie Catchpole