This guest blog is by Alex “Aeon” Aviado of ServerPoint.com.
You’ve heard of this time and again: If you want to maximize your website, you must have a reliable web hosting company.
Web hosting services have continuously grown during the last half of the decade, allowing many businesses and personal sites to be accessible in the huge database of the worldwide web.
There were two kinds of web hosting services available to the market 5 years ago:
- shared hosting and
- dedicated servers.
Shared hosting is the cheapest and most common choice for first timers. Shared hosting allows you to share a server with hundreds of users.
While this may be a frugal choice, it comes with consequences such as not being able to fully customize and install software to enhance the server’s performance. Another price to pay is that memory or RAM is limited and rationed due to the fact that shared hosting has a dense population of users.
However, shared hosting has a user friendly control panel and when a problem in the server arises, a dedicated tech support team will fix it for the users.
Dedicated servers on the other hand, give you complete command of the server. This service allows you to install and edit as much as you want.
RAM and space are abundant resources in dedicated servers since you are not sharing bandwidth with hundreds of users. The downside of this service is that you will need to spend more money on IT tech support in case of a server problem, or server maintenance.
Dedicated servers are generally more expensive than its simpler counterpart.
While most small to medium businesses are under shared provider web hosting, and busier online businesses employ dedicated servers, there is a new and trending service called VPS.
Virtual Private Server – VPS cloud hosting is practically the fine line between shared hosting and dedicated servers.
VPS is basically a partitioned dedicated server, meaning you have a higher than average resource access than shared hosting. Also, VPS hosting shares the simplicity and user friendly interface of shared hosting. And lastly, VPS hosting is similar to dedicated servers because the inner workings such as PHP, CSS etc. are accessible.
The difference of this special hosting service between its predecessors is that everything is connected to a virtual server instead of a local host. Data uploaded to virtual servers are run and stored by virtual machines. Virtual machines are the same as your local web host server’s functions, only this time its location is different.
An advantage of VPS is that users can stack multiple virtual machines on a single virtual server, meaning you can combine your server’s bandwidth to other companies.
In VPS, even though users share platforms like that of shared hosting, they do not see each other at all. Only people you authorize can gain access and interaction to your server.
VPS is also advantageous since it lets you host an unlimited number of webpages. Do the math and figure how much you can gain profit from it.
With VPS, users do not need to maintain their servers. VPS is basically a semi management structure, where maintenance, installation of crucial software and server repairs are done by its own tech team.
Other factors, such as updating your PHP up to date, are already the users’ responsibility.
With the emergence of many online businesses and blogs, online hosting is a feasible and profitable way to earn money online. By providing aspiring online merchants their space, hosting services is evolving to become the new real estate in the online world.
Alex “Aeon” Aviado is a Marketing Consultant for ServerPoint, a cloud hosting provider. They offer the highest quality web hosting and dedicated server hosting services that you can find anywhere in the industry.