Guide on The Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses

There are many types of web hosting designed for webmasters with different budgets and website needs. Understanding the differences of each type of web hosting allows you to make the right choice when you are shopping for a web hosting service. The best type of web hosting for your business will depend on your purpose and website needs. There are four main types of web hosting for small businesses including shared, VPS, dedicated and reseller hosting.

1. Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the lowest level of web hosting and it is also the cheapest type of hosting you can sign up. It is called shared hosting because thousands of webmasters will be hosting their sites on the same server. The resources are being divided equally among the thousands of webmasters to reduce the operation cost. Shared hosting is the best web hosting for small businesses who have just started out and not yet receive any significant traffic.

All the sites hosted on the shared server shares the same type of resources including CPU and RAM. With the resources being shared, your website can quickly exceed the resources limit when it starts to get a lot of traffic. Shared hosting does not give you root access to the server so that you won’t be able to customize the settings of the server for your website needs. Root access may not be important for small sites but it can definitely mean a big deal if it is a large business site. Shared hosting is available in both Linux and Windows version.

2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a higher level of web hosting plan compared to shared hosting. Like shared hosting, it hosts multiple accounts but only a few people are sharing the same server. The server is partitioned with the use of a special software. Each partition is operated completely independent of one another. If a webmaster reaches the limit of the resources on his partition, other websites hosted on other partitions won’t be affected.

VPS gives you root access so you will be able to carry out administrative tasks on the server including add/delete files, install/uninstall apps. You must have a team of staff that is knowledgeable in managing a VPS server otherwise you should choose a managed VPS where all the maintenance tasks are being taken care by the web hosting company’s technical team.

VPS is relatively affordable and costs only twice the price of a shared hosting plan. When you are shopping for a VPS plan, you should check features like CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth. You should also find out what type of control panel you will be provided if you choose the managed VPS plan. The control panel can be a proprietary dashboard created by the web hosting company or cPanel.

3. Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting gives you the highest level of resources because you get to use the resources of the entire server for your websites. Dedicated hosting is the best because you are not sharing the server with anyone else. Because of the dedicated allocation of resources, your website will be able to run fast even during the peak time when you are getting a huge incoming of visitors. Dedicated hosting is ideal for a business site where you cannot afford your site to experience downtime as this could mean a difference in the loss of profit. Dedicated hosting usually maintain the uptime at a level that is higher than 99.94%.

High traffic will not cause problems for the websites. Since you have root access, you will be able to strengthen the security of your server by installing security software. Your site performance will no longer be affected by other sites since only your site occupies the server. The staff at the web hosting company will take care of the hardware of the dedicated server. However, it is the customer who will have control of the server for example installing any software they want. You will need to have a team of professionals who have experience in managing the dedicated server.

4. Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is for people who want to sell web hosting services without having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in buying their own data center and servers. Reseller hosting is also ideal for web designers who want to host the clients’ sites that they design. Many reseller hosting plans include a free WHMCS for you to manage the billing and ticket requests submitted by your customers. It will also include a free cPanel for you to manage the websites.

With the reseller hosting, you can run a web hosting business under your own brand. Reseller hosting features anonymous name servers, site builder, free website themes, and site builders. Some reseller web hosting plans will take a percentage of the commission you earn from reselling the web hosting services while others don’t charge any fee at all. You can set up the hosting account for your customers and your customers will have access to Softaculous one click installer to install the scripts.

Original post: Guide on The Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses

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