What are the different types of web hosting?

    Cloud hosting is the latest form of web hosting that has hit the web hosting industry. Cloud hosting offers clients increased reliability and better website resilience and scalability, which is why it has become one of the best alternatives to other forms of web hostings, such as shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. 

     

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    Now, before considering why cloud hosting is continually growing in popularity, let’s first look at the other major categories of web hosting. 

    Shared hosting

    Shared hosting occurs when a website is stored on, and shares space on a web server with many other websites. This makes shared hosting one of the cheaper options, in relation to other web hosting types, because the maintenance costs of keeping the server updated is spread across various websites. This makes shared hosting the perfect options for smaller websites, personal blogs and portfolios. The downside of shared hosting is that other websites can affect your website’s performance, in terms of site uptime and site speed, for example when another website experiences a spike in traffic, this will affect your website’s performance. Shared hosting servers do not manage high traffic volumes and surges well, and are in general, less secure than other web hosting options. 

    Dedicated hosting 

    Dedicated hosting is exactly the opposite of shared hosting. With dedicated hosting, websites have their own web server and no other websites have space on that server, which means other websites cannot affect the performance of your website. You can control and reconfigure your server to your own specifications and website needs. This advantage of having a web server all to yourself does however come at an elevated price. Paying a higher price for dedicated hosting may be worth it for larger businesses and companies that cannot afford site downtime or a slow site speed due to their high volumes of daily traffic on their website per day. 

    VPS hosting

    VPS (Virtual Private Servers) hosting, like shared hosting, allows for multiple websites to be hosted on one web server but offers many advantages that are generally associated with dedicated hosting. VPS hosting is sort of a combination of shared and dedicated hosting. With VPS hosting, websites are stored on a virtual server managed by software as a dedicated server, yet operates in an environment similar to shared hosting. VPS hosting offers people benefits of dedicated hosting (such as a personal IP address and better site uptime) without actually having a dedicated server, which is why it is a good option for people looking to upgrade from shared hosting, but cannot afford the costs of dedicated hosting. 

    Cloud hosting 

    Cloud hosting is very similar to VPS hosting, but instead of a website having space on one server, it has space across various servers. Cloud hosting, in theory, is the combination of hundreds of servers that operate as one large server, called a ‘cloud’, on which websites are stored. Cloud hosting has become a very popular type of hosting because, like VPS hosting, it can handle large amounts of traffic variation and spikes, but unlike shared hosting, the performance of other websites do not affect your website’s performance. So, if a website takes down the same server your website is stored on, your host provider will simply move your website to another server. Cloud hosting also allows for website scalability unlike ever before. Cloud hosting has made upscaling a website, with more and better resources, a breeze. All web hosting providers need to do is to increase the server’s total resources that a website can consume in any given time to accommodate upgrades and additions. 

     

    The resources of cloud hosting allows it to be used for almost any purpose, from hosting a one-page website to replacing an entire business server. 

    Which web hosting type is best

    Every type of web hosting has its advantages and disadvantages. Shared hosting is cheapest but does come with a list of drawbacks, dedicated hosting gives you complete control of your server but at a much higher price, and VPS hosting, a combination of both with its own set of advantages. Yet, cloud hosting offers increasing reliability in terms of site uptime and site speed, increased website resilience in light of unexpected traffic surges, and better scalability for those looking to add more resources to a website.