VTek Hosting Guide

Every website needs a hosting provider, even if that means hosting a site from your own home network. The type of hosting you select will have a large impact on how the website operates, which code bases are supported, and how much networking and hardware costs will be incurred. 

Wikipedia: Web hosting

Free hosting - This is the no cost choice, but it does come with strings attached. Free web hosting tends to be extremely slow, have fewer options for customization, and is often supported by ads placed by the host directly on your website. Some popular forms of free web hosting include Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr, and other free blogging platforms that will allow you to build a free website directly on their servers. You will face limitations on functionality as well as editorial control, but it won't cost anything to get started. This may be a good place to start to learn more about building web traffic and how sites interact.

Shared hosting

The cheapest form of paid web hosting is shared hosting. This is a type of hosting environment where hundreds - if not thousands - of user accounts are hosted from the same machine or server array. Performance tends to be lower than high end choices, but depending on the provider you may have access to a larger variety of content management software to choose from in building your websites.

VPS

VPS stands for a Virtual Private Server, and it is a very robust option for web hosting although it may not be user friendly for new users. A VPS partitions a larger machine in to smaller sections that are apportioned to a particular customer. The amount of resources available is usually proportionate to the amount of money you're spending each month. Depending on the VPS provider, you may get direct command line access to your server or you may get access to a control panel like system. Command line servers tend to have better performance and more customization options, but they're not particularly easy for newer web publishers to understand.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting usually means a dedicated machine for your server as well as a dedicated staff of tech support on call to help you out in case anything goes wrong. In addition to providing the largest amount of computing resources for your website, dedicated hosting provides you with the highest levels of service and technical assistance that cheaper web servers simply can't provider. If money isn't an option because your website is already making money, this is the way to go to get the best performance, highest levels of customization, and easiest customer experience.

Hosting Reviews 

Because of the great variation in providers, it is always a great idea to review many sources before settling on one. Once your site is built on someone's servers, it will be difficult to set them up in a new host later on. Making a wise choice in the first place will pay off with tons of saved time and hours of avoided frustrations.

Consider what features are most important for you as a user and what features your website will require. Do you expect a lot of traffic? Are you running complex scripts or basic content management systems? Will your site use high definition media or will it mostly be text based? Windows or Linux? Answering those questions first will make finding the right web host easier for you!

Here's what to look for:

Price

Reliability

Speed

Functionality (root access, customization, etc)

What's the cloud?

"The cloud" is really like a type of premium web hosting. Instead of hosting your files from a single physical server, the data can be co-located in data centers spread across the globe.

This is a little more expensive, but it provides a lot of benefits!

For one thing, each visitor can access the files from the data center that is physically closest to them. This means fewer network hops and better response times.

It also means that you have fewer points of failure. If a server goes down in a typical web hosting environment, the site will be completely down. If you're using a cloud service, the one server that's down won't affect the other 19 that are up. Every once in a rare while, some major provider's cloud services will go down altogether, but it is so rare that it might make headlines.

Cloud hosting can also scale on the fly. What's that mean? Well, the amount of computing resources that a website needs can be highly variable. Large bursts of traffic can be taxing on a server, but cloud services are able to instantly allocate more resources across the multiple data centers, as needed.

Do you need all that?

Probably not if you're just getting started. It can be worth the extra costs if you're expanding an already-large website or if you're specifically targeting an international audience.