A web page is made up of text and media files like images, videos, audio files and banners. These files are stored on a web server. Whenever someone visits your website, it’s this web server that retrieves all these files and sends them to the web browser of your site’s visitor. So basically you can say that your site is like a document that is stored on a computer known as web server and your site’s visitors access the files associated with your site through the web server.
In any type of web hosting, you pay a web hosting service provider to store your website on its web servers on their premises. There are basically three types of web hosting known as shared web hosting, dedicated web hosting and virtual web hosting.
As the name suggests, in this type of web hosting you share web space on one server with many other websites. Depending on the server capacity, there can be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web sites on the same server.
For small business owners or those who are looking for experimenting with the idea of having a website at lower costs, shared web hosting is the most preferred option as it is the cheapest type of web hosting service.
Shared web hosting is also a preferred option for those who are not well versed in IT services because setting up a website on a shared web server is fairly easy as compared to a dedicated web server.
Shared web hosting is cheap and easy but it is also the least reliable type of web hosting service. The fact that you are sharing web space with many other websites makes it unreliable as the server can crash owing to overwhelming amount of web traffic.
Furthermore, if the service provider has employed cheap hardware then the performance of your website can be compromised even when the web traffic is not significantly low.
Dedicated web hosting
In dedicated web hosting you are allotted a web server entirely for your website. As a customer you get complete control over the web server through a web interface or control panel.
The attributes of dedicated web hosting are significantly different than shared web hosting. Dedicated web hosting services are significantly more expensive as compared to shared web hosting services. You can easily be charged up to a $100 per month in case of dedicated web hosting. Before making a decision you must carefully think about the needs of your business. There is no point in paying for a dedicated web server if you only intend to run a fitness blog. On the other hand if you have a big business or if you have a retail website that receives significant amount of web traffic 24 hours of a day then it’s better to pay for a dedicated web server.
Dedicated web hosting is also more secure as compared to shared web hosting. Since you get complete control over the machine, you can define the security parameters yourself.