The wide variety of services and features often confuses you when you are looking for a suitable hosting plan for your needs. Therefore, before ordering hosting, it is good to consider it with your needs, but also with the capabilities of the respective hosting plan and the requirements of the project that you will have on the hosting.

In the following lines you will learn:

• The differences between Shared Hosting, Leased Servers and VPS (Virtual Private Server);
• What is cloud, cloud server and cloud hosting;
• What is Managed Hosting – Managed Hosting;
• How to choose the most suitable hosting plan for you.

What is a Shared Hosting

The most commonly used type of hosting is shared. In shared hosting, several users share a physical server resource that has access to the network. All sites of different users are stored on the same disk, processed by the same CPU and delivered again by the same web server. This is the reason why shared hosting has the most affordable service. Keep in mind that all sites on all accounts on a particular server compete for the same shared resources.

Servers that support shared hosting plans are much more powerful and larger than home computers and can host thousands of sites and pages without a problem. It should be borne in mind that if a site becomes more popular and needs additional resources – shared hosting will no longer be a suitable solution for it.

Every page load, every image and file asset must be processed by the web server upon request – when someone requests them, or in other words, when a user wants to load your site. If you support a complex web application or CMS (content management system, WordPress for example), they will require more processing power than standard to communicate with the database, combine content on the page and other similar activities. When performing the listed actions once, things happen instantly. But multiplied by hundreds or thousands of visitors in a matter of minutes, the site is more likely to “crash” or load slower than normal. And you know that the loading time of a page is crucial, as well as to achieve the ultimate goal (sales for example),

If a website with high traffic and generating more traffic is located on the same server where it is located and your site is more likely to have problems loading it or the site crashing. If you are the owner of such a popular and generating huge traffic site, it is good to consider a solution other than shared hosting.

Shared hosting has other disadvantages, such as the inability to customize the hosting environment. For example, if you support a regular WordPress page, setting up the environment may not be very important. But if you are trying to run a more complex project, such as a custom application developed with a complex structure, then this shortcoming can cause you trouble with installing the necessary dependencies.

There is a risk that your site may be affected, no matter how secure, if any of the other sites with which you share a server space have software vulnerabilities that make it vulnerable and allow malicious attacks that may affect you. The IP address is also shared with the other sites on the server. If one of the sites uses your account to send spam emails (unsolicited commercial messages) or other types of malicious activity, then the IP address of your site may be blocked by spam filters and blacklisted. As there is a high probability that you will not understand at all that this has happened to you.

Shared hosting is suitable for the sites of small to medium businesses, personal pages and blogs, start-up businesses and other types of pages, whose needs fit perfectly into the resources of shared hosting plans, and its price is affordable. Free technical support is included in the shared hosting plans, which is an advantage as no in-depth technical knowledge is required to use the service.

What is a Dedicated Hosting

With Dedicated Hosting, you have complete control over the entire server, which is a physical machine, providing many benefits. They are a little more complicated to manage and also more expensive than shared hosting.

Leased servers When you have full and direct access to the server on which your webpage is uploaded, you can install any type of software you need, make changes to the operating system or programming language, as well as make configuration settings and create virtual machines. for example within the physical one. For some applications, such as your company’s ERP or CRM systems or specialized software development, you will need just that level of control.

A key advantage of Dedicated Hosting is that you are the only one who has server resources, as opposed to shared hosting. This greatly increases the speed and presentation of your website.

With a leased server, you can determine and choose the manufacturer, type of machine and its resources – disk space, RAM, number of cores, and each service provider determines different configurations to choose from.

The maintenance of the rented server, software updates, troubleshooting in case of problems and conflicts is the responsibility of the tenant of the equipment.

Hardware, with a leased server, when you want to upgrade your machine or replace a component of it, you need to contact a service provider to prepare an offer on your request and calculate the new monthly rental fee. Physically, the replacement of components is performed by representatives of the hosting company.

What is a VPS (Virtual private Server)

Somewhere between the virtualization of the cloud server and the leased server (one account on one physical server) is located VPS hosting . With this model, you again have a leased server, but this time the machine is virtual, not physical. In it, a physical server is divided into several independent virtual machines. VPS hosting provides full access and control over the environment, as with Dedicated servers. This is extremely useful when developing custom applications or in the SaaS (Software as a service) model.

With virtual servers, you have much more access to the server resource than shared hosting. While different virtual machines are all that share server resources, usually far fewer of them are on a single physical server in a VPS environment. You use much more of the total computing power and bandwidth / connectivity – the amount of data you can physically send over the appropriate network, cable, etc. (bandwidth).

The use of VPS also reduces security and protection issues. The VPS service has its own IP address and virtualization layer, which means you are isolated from any issues that are not related to your site.