subject: How to Choose the Right Hosting Plan in Canada [print this page] How to Choose the Right Hosting Plan in Canada
How do you know which hosting plan will be right for your Canadian website? Generally speaking there are around five different types of web hosting services offered to webmasters from Canada. You have Shared Hosting, Business Hosting, Virtual Private Server Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting. Making a choice between all of them can be confusing and difficult. You have so many different features to compare. But don't worry, once you know what each one entails, it's easier to decided which one is the best for you, and for the price that's right.
Let's look at shared hosting, which is also called personal hosting, first. What it means is that your site will share its hosting with other websites. All the server resources are split evenly among different hosting accounts. It also means that if you attempt to use more than what's considered to be your 'fair share', the performance of your website will suffer. This makes any shared web hosting suitable for handling websites with low traffic, but that runs very little 'dynamic' content, like PHP scripts or Python scripts.
When you deal with business hosting, you're still sharing, but you get some extra features that shared hosting is unable to support. This is mostly the SSL (secured socket layer) and the Static IP. The SSL enables you to communicate in a secure manner online and accept and handle financial transactions safely. This makes business hosting an excellent choice for small e-commerce businesses.
Business hosting can also support Static IP, which means your site is going to be accessible across the planet via a dedicated and unique address that belongs to only you. It also improves your Google ranking, as well as on Yahoo and Bing. It's due to the fact that you are not sharing your IP with anybody else. This makes business hosting plans stand out from the rest. The one drawback is that you're still 'sharing' resources.
If you opt for a VPS in Canada (virtual private server), you get all the great features of business hosting, plus a guarantee of accessing more powerful resources. These servers give you total control over you website and your server, providing you with a totally customizable Linux server as your platform (some providers also offer other platforms). Your virtual private servers actually share one common physical server, just as with the shared environments, but the number of sites sharing the server is much lower, usually around 25 per server. Shared hosting has around 1000 websites per server. Larger websites are the ones that need a VPS, especially those with dynamic content and larger disk space requirements.
If you go for a dedicated server, you get the top of the line. This puts you in total control over everything. You have direct access to any and all hardware. They're usually configured to meet all your website's performance requirements and are fully customizable for taking on specific applications. Unlike what you get with shared hosting, they allow you to run services like MySQL or PostgreSQL to improve the performance of your heavier applications. Dedicated servers give you the same interface that you get with virtual private servers, only they have additional advantages in the form of increased processor power, additional bandwidth, more RAM, and higher amount of disk space, and an unshared environment.
