As technology is growing day by day each and every person wants to switch to the internet. If you are owning your business or in the education sector or even in any profession and you want to recognize your profession or business on the internet you need to develop your website and host that website on a server so everyone who is accessing the internet recognizes your identity.
Web hosting is a necessity for any website — it is the physical location of your website on the Internet, an online storage center that houses the information, images, video, and other content that comprises your website. You can understand this whole story with this example:
In the physical world if you wanna build your house you have to first buy a plot or a piece of land after that you have to build your house there and that house has a specific address right…? In the same way, when you enter the internet world you have to first buy some space(physical machine to your workplace) that is called a web server and then you build your home there that is called your website and also some address is called your domain name.
Owning a web server is a tedious job and also brings lots of responsibility, the same as in your own house you have to be responsible for all the maintenance, renovation, and modification. In this approach your prime focus shifts from your business to maintaining the web server, so it’s not a good choice. Instead of buying, we can rent some space and host our website there. Now the question arises of how you rent the server, for this lots of web hosting providers are available and they have minimal charges for hosting services. The benefits of this approach are you have less responsibility on the server side. You can just focus on your work and you can rent space according to your need so you can pay according to your needs.
What are the different types of Web Hosting?
Most web hosts provide different kinds of hosting so you can serve different clients with their different needs — whether you want to build a simple personal blog or own a large online business and are in a dire need of an intricate company website. Here are the types of web hosting which are mostly available :
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
1. Shared Hosting: It is the best suitable for the initial level of your website, in this you have shared all the resources like RAM, and CPU with the other hosted website. It is the same as if you have a flat in one building with all shared premises and facilities. This approach has its own pros and cons and they are as follows:
Pros :
- Low cost, excellent for small online business websites
- No need for specific technical knowledge
- Pre-configured server options
- User-friendly control panel — cPanel/Plex
- Maintenance and server administration is taken care for you
Cons:
- Little or no control over server configuration
- Traffic surges on other websites can slow down your website.
Think like this: you rent a flat in some building and you have a common porch, lift, stairs, parking, garden space, and clubhouse. Now imagine all sounds perfect, but suddenly one day your near flat member has a party and they are using the same lift, corridor, and parking. Now you want to go to the office and have problems going out because of this. When will it happen often then? And one day you throw a party and on the same day, a few neighbors also throw parties. Now it’s meshed. Then you think to improvise your life, you take a whole floor for yourself. This is called VPS, the next topic.
2. VPS Hosting: Virtual private server — you are still using a shared server but now you have an entirely separate partition for you on that server. This means you get a dedicated space and a reserved amount of resources and memory. It will understand by this that now you have your entire floor in that building with the shared resources. This approach is great for the medium size business with a rapidly growing number of websites and traffic.
Pros:
- Specific server space
- Traffic surges on other websites have no effect on your performance
- Root access to the server
- Easy scalability and high customizability
Cons:
- More expensive than other types of hosting
- Technical and server management knowledge is a must
Now imagine you rented a whole floor, but still for your parties parking space is limited, common lift, and stairs to get into your floor. And some other floor members also have the same parties on their floor. Now things get so messy, the lift, stairs, and parking lot still have limited space. Now you think why not I rent the whole building, then every resource is owned by me. This is called dedicated hosting, next topic.
3. Dedicated Hosting: In this, the server is exclusively rented by you and your website is the only one stored on it. Now you can configure your server as you wish, choose the operating system and software you want to use, and set up the whole hosting environment according to your own needs. In general, you can understand in this way that now you are renting the whole building.
Pros:
- Full control over server configuration
- High reliability and security options
- Root access to your server
Cons:
- High cost, more oriented towards larger businesses
- Technical and server management knowledge is a must
- Dedicated host fails, single point of failure.
- Cannot increase/decrease the size of resources when needed.
Now you have your own building, you have your own laws, all resources just for you. But now you have more people coming to your parties (in server terms we call it traffic). Few more people are coming and your building resources are now full, now neither you can build up a new floor for them, nor you can rent a whole building for new people, as renting a new building is costly and it will take a time to find, agreements and all that stuff. Renting the whole building for parties, after parties then rent is just going to waste.
The better idea is why not do some agreement with someone as when I have a party I’ll use your space and how much space & time I’ll use I’ll pay instead of renting as full ownership. Does mean you have an elastic feature, you can increase and decrease your server space when needed. This is called Cloud hosting, the next topic. When I find someone like this, I guess I don’t need to rent the whole building anymore. Pay as used space & time. Sounds promising, let’s learn about cloud hosting more.
4. Cloud Hosting:
As we talked about the features, renting resources as per the use case, and paying for used services only, no more resource wastage.
Pros:
- Elasticity: scale up/down resources when needed
- High reliability: no single point of failures
- Concerned Security
- High availability
- Fault Tolerance
- Pay as per used resources
Cons:
- Need to understand networking
- Need to manage resources by yourself.
- Have knowledge of the security concerns well.
- Need experts to manage cost management, as accidentally choose expensive resources, while it won’t be useful for your use case.
In the market there are lots of cloud service providers, some of the popular providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform(GCP), Digital Ocean, Linode, Alibaba cloud, etc.
While the major concern is elasticities, scaling up and down the resources as per the traffic, we can do it by horizontal & vertical scaling in terms of servers. We will discuss it in some other article.