Web hosting is a server or a souped-up computer where all your websites live. When someone types in your domain name, their computer points to the server, downloads the website files and displays the website. There are many types of web hosting, such as shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, etcetera.
Shared hosting explains itself in the name. In shared hosting, you’re sharing your hosting with others. In this, a particular server is shared among many people. It really varies on the web host, but there may be as many as hundreds or thousands of other websites hosted on the same server as yours. The pro of this type of hosting is that an individual can get hosting at a very cheap and affordable cost. It is the most economical way to start a website and is a very often recommended way of starting. There are also a few downsides of shared hosting, such as resources. Your website is on a server with potentially thousands of other websites, and everyone is sharing the same RAM and processor. It’s not always as bad as it sounds because hosting platforms have a way to compartmentalise resources and make sure that there’s not a hog website using up all the power, but it’s still a limitation. If you are getting one-hundredth of the RAM and processor of a server, your website may load quickly for a light or medium load. But say you are an eCommerce store, and you get a spike in traffic from a great weekend sale. These types of scenarios are not handled well by shared hosting. So is shared hosting worth it? Well, again, if you are running a casual blog or small business website, shared hosting is absolutely worth it. It is readily available, offered by almost every hosting company, and highly affordable.
The next type of hosting is dedicated hosting or a dedicated server. In this hosting, an entire physical server is reserved for a single website. It is only a particular website’s stuff hosted on a server and nothing else. A dedicated server is theoretically the most potent option because you’re not sharing it with anyone. Still, the major downside of this type of hosting is that you can’t easily upgrade or downgrade, unlike in other kinds of web hosting such as VPS. Also, a dedicated server or dedicated web hosting is insanely expensive. It is only useful if you are a giant company, and you need multiple dedicated servers working together to host your files. It really depends on the person or the website to which type of web hosting they require. Each and every hosting type is made for certain purposes. Some of them are cheap and affordable and are meant for small websites, and others are quite expensive and are meant for large-scale websites.
If any website doesn’t require significant bandwidth, control, computing power, or memory, then an individual can save money by opting for shared hosting. However, if you have got a huge business website with a lot of traffic and websites that require a large number of server resources, and you have a set-up that can efficiently manage a specialised hosting set-up, dedicated web hosting can be the best choice.
