When building a website, the first decision you need to make is what kind of hosting plan you should be on. Should you choose a shared or dedicated package? Is your Wordpress site ok with managed hosting, or has it grown to the point where it's needing VPS hosting? To help you make the best decision for your site, take a look at this quick guide to five different major hosting types.
1. Shared Hosting (Best for: Small Sites)
Shared hosting is called "shared" because it means your website is not the only site on your server. You are sharing that server space and all of the accompanying resources with other sites and users. The advantage of shared hosting is that it's easily the cheapest hosting option out there, and all of the technical concerns for hosting your site are taken care of by the provider. The problem with shared hosting is that, because the server's resources are being divided out to many different sites, sudden surges in traffic can cause your site to crash.
2. Dedicated Hosting (Best for: Professional Sites)
The complete opposite of shared hosting, dedicated hosting means that you have an entire server all to yourself. This means that all of that server's resources can go directly into powering your site. This won't just keep your site up and running, but it will greatly improve your performance speed. As an added bonus, dedicated hosting is probably the most secure hosting option, as someone would literally have to hack directly into your server in order to gain access to your data. The problem with dedicated hosting is that it's expensive - really, really expensive. Dedicated hosting may be the most secure hosting option, but it comes at the highest price. Dedicated hosting can sometimes cost five or even ten times what you would be paying with the same company for a shared hosting package, and so it's typically way out of budget for first-time website owners.
3. VPS Hosting (Best for: Sites that are growing)
If your site is too big for shared hosting, but a dedicated server is out of your price range, a nice middle-ground option is VPS (Virtual Private Server). When you purchase a VPS plan, you're essentially purchasing your own virtual machine. While you're technically sharing a server with other users, that server has been carved up into several mini-servers that each function in complete isolation. Long story short, when you purchase a VPS, you're basically purchasing a tiny server, whose resources and admin functionality are 100% yours to use as you wish. This essentially gives you the resources of a dedicated server at the price of a shared hosting plan. The only trouble with VPS hosting is that, because you are purchasing your own server space, you are responsible for managing it as well.
4. Managed Wordpress Hosting (Best for: New website managers)
If you have a big Wordpress site, but you don't want to take on the technical or administrative responsibilities of a VPS hosting plan, managed hosting is probably the right move for you. Managed hosting plans are specifically designed for Wordpress sites, and so provide you with the resources your site needs to stay up and running, no matter how big your site gets. It's called a "managed" hosting plan, however, because those additional resources come with some restrictions. If you're on a managed plan, then the technical management of your Wordpress site becomes the responsibility of your hosting provider. Of course, you still have complete power over the editing and performance management of your site, but things like server security, site security, and updates are all handled by the hosting provider.
5. Cloud Hosting (Best for: E-commerce sites)
A relatively new hosting option, cloud hosting essentially stores your website in the cloud, and pools the resources of multiple physical servers to keep your site up and running. The benefits of this kind of hosting is that your site has essentially unlimited resources. No matter how big or busy your site gets, resources can be pulled from other servers to keep your site running without affecting the performance of other sites on the cloud.
