What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a pretty vague term because there are plenty of web
hosting types out there, ranging from Shared Web Hosting up to
Clustered Web Hosting, I will be explaining all of these in this
article.

Shared Web Hosting

This probably is the most popular type of web hosting on the
internet. Shared web hosting means you and other people share the same
server and are hsoted on the same server. Usually, there is a control
panel such as cPanel that helps you manage your email and other
features such as MySQL. This is the most common type of web hosting
purchased by people who run their own small blog or a small business.

Reseller Web Hosting

This type of web hosting is less popular compared to Shared Web
Hosting. Reseller web hosting is a special type of account that comes
with a special control panel which generally is WHM and the difference
is that Reseller Web Hosting gives you the ability to give away shared
web hosting. Typically, start up web hosting companies get Reseller web
hosting so that they can offer Shared Web Hosting.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Servers are pretty common for people who have out
grown the resources of Shared web hosting but do not want to pay yet
the high prices of dedicated servers. Virtual Private Servers are
virtual machines located on dedicated servers; it’s like dividing the
server into small servers. However; the Virtual Private Servers are not
shared, you have your own operating system, your own kernel. It’s a
complete dedicated server environment.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are a bit less popular due to their high prices
however they are usually used by very high traffic websites or web
hosting companies who would like to have their own servers instead of
working on Reseller Web Hosting. Usually the servers are leased with a
specific bandwidth allotment and when purchasing, you usually choose
the server’s specifications (RAM, HDD, CPU)

Colocation

Colocation is pretty close to Dedicated Servers; however, the
colocation provider only does provide you with bandwidth, space &
power for your server. You have to purchase your own server and send it
to the colocation provider. The colocation provider has nothing to do
with your server and generally colocation is not recommended unless
it’s a local datacenter because of the high costs of repairs.

Clustered Hosting

This most probably is the least used web hosting solution as it
comes at a high price and is for high usage sites. They usually have
multiple servers and each server would get a specific role, one server
could serve all the HTTP traffic and one would manage all the MySQL
traffic. Usually; this is a custom solution and it is not sold as
packages on the internet.