Hosting Services

In this article the different types of hosting services are explained to help you best find the hosting services to meet your personal or business needs.

Hosting suggests a computer, something similar to the one you use at home or at the office, it will be connected to the Internet, and this is where your website's files reside. This is how people who surf the Internet can access your website. A definition for a web hosting services could be:

Web Hosting Services A service provider with a computer or a network of computers, connected to the Internet, where you can place your web site. What they basically do is rent out computer space and its connection to you this way you can make your web site available on the Internet. The hosting services have all the responsibility of keeping the server (and your website) online, and also maintaining and upgrading it.

Typically hosting services don't have just a few computers; they have hundreds of them. Depending on the amount of money you want to spend and your needs, you can rent from the hosting services a whole server, or you can share the rent on a server with others or you can even buy the server and pay only for the connection and the maintenance. So, when we talk about hosting services, we talk about three types of hosting: dedicated hosting, shared hosting and collocated hosting.

Dedicated Hosting.
As it suggests you have a dedicated server where you can upload your website(s). You have remote access on the computer and you have the freedom to install and update on it any software you want or need. If you have a large site(s) with lot of traffic (bringing in an income) this type of hosting service is the best the costs are a little bit higher than, for example, shared hosting.

Shared Hosting.
A shared hosting service means that your website is on a server with other websites. The total space on the computer's hard drive is divided into smaller amounts and you get an amount of that disk space. Your website will get an amount of disk space and data transfer (bandwidth) allocated, it will also share the computer's hardware and software resources (the memory, the CPU, the database server, etc.), but don’t worry, your information will remain confidential. No user/website can access the files of another user/website residing on the same server. This type of hosting is the cheapest of the three types presented, but it's good enough for almost 95% of the people looking for web hosting services.

Collocated hosting.
Quite similar to dedicated hosting the difference being that you actually own the server, so, beside software upgrades, you can buy hardware upgrades too (more memory, larger hard drives, etc.). The advantage is that the server stays in a protected remote environment, with optimal connections to the Internet, rather than staying in an office or at home.

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