subject: How To Opt Best Website Hosting Services? [print this page] Choosing the best website hosting services is one of the most important and difficult decisions for most business owners. The fact that there are thousands of hosting providers offering varying webhosting products and services along with discounted deals make things more complicated. However, a few tips and precautions can help you make the best decision for your business, as far as website hosting is concerned.
If you are new to the world of web hosting, it is highly recommended that you first carefully analyze your hosting requirements and expectations about the future before choosing a free hosting package.
A free web hosting package will help you get your site hosted and you will also be able to find the "truth" behind claims of the providers. However, you just cannot select any free package from any provider. The package must be offered by a reputed provider (web hosting company), should keep your website accessible to all at all times, and should offer different, useful, and relevant features so that you can have a clear and complete understanding about the web hosting solutions and industry. In short, free webhosting has to be used as a learning platform while keeping your website hosted by a good provider.
Once you have satisfied yourself with quality of the solutions and find that the claims made by the provider are genuine in nature, you can opt for shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS), or dedicated server hosting as per budget and specific requirements of your business.
It is worthwhile to note here that shared hosting involved sharing of different websites on a single server and each of these website share bandwidth, server space, and other resources with others. This is the cheapest form of web hosting but may be characterized by slow website speed. VPS, on the other hand, is about allocation of a private server space for a website's owned applications. Websites that choose this form of hosting get a guaranteed share of the server CPU, network, and disk input/output but they still share the resources with other account holders on the server. The primary difference between VPS and shared hosting is that websites using VPS get more privacy and more control over certain resources than experienced by those using shared website hosting. Dedicated server hosting is all about a website being the complete owner of the entire server in the hosting plan.
If you are also opting for domain registration along with website hosting services, you can choose a single provider that specializes in both these services. Opting for a single provider instead of choosing two different providers will mean more efforts devoted toward identifying the best in the business. Moreover, you will have to deal with two providers if you decided to choose two providers (one for domain name registration and one for website hosting solutions). Take time and choose the best!