Choosing The Right Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a web hosting provider can be a daunting and time consuming task

. With literally thousands of companies competing for your business, sorting through your hosting options can take hours of your valuable time. To minimize the time you spend researching your possible hosting options, you first need to determine what capabilities your website will need.

There are four major categories of web hosting providers to consider: Free hosting, Shared hosting, Semi-Dedicated Hosting and Dedicated Hosting.

Free Hosting. If your website is for friends, family or a small home business, free hosting can be a good choice for your web site. Most free hosting sites offer advance services that support CGI, PHP, Perl and ASP. In addition, Database support is also frequently provided.

The two major drawbacks of free hosting are low site bandwidth and banner ads. Free hosting companies make their money by selling ad space which is displayed on all web pages they serve. If you plan on creating a web site for your business, the ads displayed by free hosting companies make it a bad choice.

The other drawback of free hosting sites is the low bandwidth provided. If your site will have a lot of traffic or be serving multimedia or videos, a free hosting company will limit your bandwidth and shut your website down if you exceed preset limits.

Shared Hosting. Shared hosting is the most common hosting option available. Most small to medium sized businesses use some variety of shared hosting. If you need a reliable, ad free server that will guarantee uptime and performance, a shared hosting plan will usually fit your needs.

Relatively inexpensive ($5-$15 a month) shared hosting will provide you a domain name, static IP address, database connectivity and support any type of back end scripting language you need. In addition, most providers allow full customization of sub domain names, email addresses and most other backend server settings. Storage limits for shared hosting plans range from 2 GB all the way to unlimited data storage.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting. While shared hosting will work for most websites, if you have a larger website or a site that requires high security protocols, semi-dedicated hosting may be the way to go. Semi-dedicated hosting allows you to share a server with just a few other web sites and gives you nearly complete control over your server settings. Your website runs in its own "virtual space" and does not share resources with other websites hosted with your provider.

The major drawback to semi-dedicated hosting is cost. These hosting plans can range from $30 to $100 a month depending on the level of customization your website requires.

Dedicated Hosting. If you plan on running a very large website that requires large database storage and will have very heavy bandwidth demands, dedicated hosting may be your only choice. The technical demands of serving highly resource intensive content such as multimedia files can put a severe strain on hosting providers. For this reason, most hosting companies will only allow high bandwidth sites to operate on a dedicated server to ensure that the performance of other sites hosted with their company won't suffer.

Dedicated Hosting can be very expensive. Most dedicated server plans start at well over $100 a month and require add on costs that can push the total monthly cost above $250.

by: li baocai

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