As your online business grows, your Web hosting needs will increase and become more complex. $10 per month hosting may have been fine in your first 6 months, but if your website is starting to feel sluggish, you may need to start looking at beefing up your Web server.
Think of this list as the progression of the type of hosting a growing online business can consider.
1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means just that. Your website is hosted on a server shared by other websites. The advantage of this setup is the shared cost. You can pay as little as $5-$10 per month for sharing a super server with (probably) hundreds of other websites.
The biggest disadvantage of a shared hosting account is that you're at the mercy of the other sites on your server. A really popular site may adversely affect the performance of your own site. On the other hand, if you're the most popular site on the server, you get to use a super server for a very low price.
Shared hosting is good for brochureware or getting your feet wet.
Price Range: $5 - $20. Here's a list of 10 Web Hosts for Under $10.
2. Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting packages is basically a shared hosting account with extra tools to help you resell hosting space.
Reseller packages come with greater technical control (often via the Web Host Manager (WHM) control panel), billing software to help you invoice clients, and other extra perks.
Some of those perks include:
- free website templates
- white label technical support -- that means the hosting company handles your clients' tech support issues
- private name servers -- make your company seem even bigger by telling your clients to point their domain nameservers to ns1.yourwebdesignfirm.com
Price range: Reseller packages range from $15 - $50, depending on features and resource limits.
3. Grid / Cloud Hosting
Grid or Cloud Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology that lets hundreds of individual servers work together so that it looks like one giant server. The idea is that as the need grows, the hosting company can just add more commodity hardware to make an ever larger grid or cloud.
Price Range: All grid computing packages use some form of pay-for-what-you-use pricing structure.
Base prices start at $20 for Media Temple and $100 for Mosso (a Rackspace company). Both charge more for extra bandwidth, CPU processing, memory usage, or other resource usage. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has no minimum monthly fee (you pay for only what you use), but requires more tech savvy to get started (price calculator).
4. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Virtual private servers share one physical server but acts like multiple, separate servers. A VPS is a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine. Even though each VPS instance shares hardware resources, they are allocated a dedicated slice of the computing resources.
A VPS avoids the problem of having your hosting neighbors bring down your website, while avoiding the cost of a dedicated server.
Price Range: Most VPS hosting packages cost between $50 and $200. Pricing is based on the guaranteed CPU and memory (RAM) you get. Here is a list of reliable VPS hosting providers.
5. Dedicated Server
When you have a dedicated server, it means you are renting one physical server from a hosting company. You can have full control (called "root" permissions in Linux) if you want it.
Pricing: Dedicated servers are priced from $100 and up. But if you are considering a dedicated server, you should also consider the costs of hiring a sysadmin to take care of the box.
6. Colocation
When you colocate, you rent rack space from a data center. You bring in your own server hardware and they provide power, cooling, physical security, and an internet uplink. This means you're responsible for your own server software, data storage, backup procedures, etc. If hardware fails, you're responsible for replacing it and getting the server back up and running.
Unless you have the technical know-how in-house, colocation is probably not worth the investment in time, expertise, and money for most small businesses.
7. Self Service
The ultimate hosting plan -- you do it all yourself! You buy the servers, install and configure the software, make sure there is sufficient cooling and power in your machine room, and double up everything for redundancy. Some of the things you'll have to take care of:
- data center space
- cooling
- power (with backup)
- bandwidth
- server hardware
- systems administrator
- data integrity and backup
- ... and the list goes on.