Once you have created your brand new website the first thing you need to do before any site promotion is to host it somewhere
. There are a lot of website hosting options out there, from shared hosting to a dedicated server, there are hosting options for everyone. This article looks into a number of hosting options and lists the advantages and disadvantages of them.
Cpanel hosting, or a standard hosting, is the basic, cheapest option. This is generally a web space allowing you to host one website. The server that this site sits on will be shared with several thousand other sites and performance can be hit or miss depending upon the other sites on your server.
There is usually a jump in prices to the following options but they do generally allow you to host more websites.
VPS hosting options are a great solution for many web sites. It offers you similar reliability, control and flexibility of a dedicated server but at a fraction of the price (and performance unfortunately). VPS is a virtual private server, essentially you have a full access to a server but this server sits on a powerful server and is shared with many other VPS's. If you are going for this solution try and find out how many users share the VPS as there can be a significant difference in performance depending upon the server and number of users.
Cloud hosting is a newer hosting type offering unique properties and benefits. Essentially the cloud is a network of servers that share the load of the customers. For example a cloud host might have eight servers working on several thousand websites. When more users join more computers can be added to the cloud ensuring that performance is maintained.
A semi dedicated server offers the best of both worlds. Power and performance but without a huge price tag. You share a powerful server with only a limited number of users. This also has the benefit of offering you guaranteed system resources ensuring the performance is maintained. Prices are reasonable and if you host a number of sites then this can be the ideal solution.
Dedicated servers are the final and most expensive option. They offer you extreme performance and the most flexibility in configuration as it is your server. However there is a cost associated with this that can be very high. Before considering this option it is probably better to ensure you have fully optimised your website. This is really only an option for larger corporate companies.