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Choosing the Best Hosting for Your Business

jasonlaloux | Dec 28, 2009 |

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Web hosting comes in so many sizes and shapes that choosing the right web hosting package can be challenging. After all, different sites have different hosting needs, and with all the choices out there, figuring out just exactly what your needs are isn't easy. For example, an online store is going to have very different hosting needs from a video site, but few hosting providers package their different plans in a way that's focused around the kind of site you have. Rather, they just assume that you know exactly what you need.

Well, there are five general kinds of hosting that you often end up having to choose form: (1) managed hosting (2) dedicated hosting, (3) share hosting, (4) virtual hosting, and (5) cloud hosting. Depending on the hosting provider you're looking at, there are plenty of variation on each of the five kinds of hosting, and each usually gives you the choice of running your choice of Microsoft-based and open-source technology. So knowing the difference between each kind of hositng can help you make a better decision when you're choosing a hosting package for your business.

Managed Hosting Managed hosting lets you have all the advantages of buying your own servers, but without having to deal with (1) finding your own rackspace or (2) having your own in-house IT team to keep the servers running properly. When you choose managed hosting, you lease an entire server, but let the web hosting company deal with configurating it and making sure that it runs properly. So while you're not in full control of how the server works, you can still manage its data via FTP or other remote management tools.

However, since managed hosting doesn't give you full control over your server configuration, it's not the best choice if your business model relies on running highly specialized or proprietary technologies. Instead, managed hosting is a more appropriate choice if your business has a relatively high-trafficked site that uses more common technology such as a commercial CMS or ecommerce platform, such as an online newspaper, high-trafficked blog, or medium sized e-shop.

Dedicated Hosting
This kind of hosting is essentially designed for businesses who exist complete and utterly online. In other words, without the internet, you couldn't do business, and rely on a relatively large piece of technology to do so. For example, you might be an online retailer with a custom CMS that manages a massive inventory and needs to be able to process thousands of queries a minute without any hiccups. Or you might be running an ad platform that's managing hundreds of ad campaigns across thousands of domains for dozens of clients.

With dedicated hosting, you lease a server and get full control over it and how it works. There are three main advantages to having complete control over your dedicated hosting like this. First, the dedicated server is already housed in a professional-grade data center, so you don't have to invest in any additional space, hardware or infrastructure (e.g. redundant power systems). Second, a dedicated server is dedicated to your platforms, meaning that nothing will affect server performance unless you let it. Lastly, with dedicated hosting, your IT team has full control over how the sever is configured, and they can customize and optimize it around the needs of your technology and your business.

Granted, this last advantage means that you actually need to have your own, in-house IT team. Of course, it having an in-house tema is not within your means, then you probably don't need dedicated hosting anyway.

Shared Hosting
This kind of hosting is the logical choice for any company that doesn't completely rely on the web to provide an actual service. These are businesses that just want to use the web as an additional place where consumers can learn about their products and services. Examples would include relatively low-trafficked corporate sites, personal blogs, or any other site that isn't going to lose money if their pages take a while to load every now and then. Share hosting is when you lease space on a server that's already hosting several other sites. In fact, shared hosting is very price-competitive because the costs are being shared by multiple clients.

However, if another one of those sites is getting a lot of traffic, it can slow down all the other sites that's sharing server space with it. Also, with shared hosting, you're not not in full control of the server, but can still manager you data via FTP. So part of what you're paying for is to have the hosting provider make sure that the server keeps running. In fact, a good shared hosting provider will also help make sure that all the sites sharing one server are well-balanced so that no particular one hogs the bandwidth to the detriment of the others.

Virtual Hosting
Virtual hosting is a good option if you receive a lot of traffic to one domain but from a variety of different platforms -- e.g. your blog and forum and live chat. For example, when users can access several different platforms with one login, and each platform uses a different databases, a single server might not be sufficient. So what a virtual server does is intercept the different queries, and then routes them to the appropriate "real server," giving your users a seemless experience across multiple platforms.

In a nutshell, virtual servers act as intermediaries between users and the real server, and are integral for "load balancing." So when considering virtual hosting, you may want to read up on load balancing, and ask different providers how their technology works in this respect.

Cloud Hosting
One of the newer kinds of kids on the hosting blog, cloud hosting is perfect for tech start-ups who expect to go through several significant growth spurts during their first few years in business, but can't be sure when those spurts are going to happen. Basically, these are companies that are going to be primarily web-based and can't afford any major down-time while their business is growing, but still have to be careful enough with their budgets as to not invest in more than they actually need at any given moment.

Cloud hosting is perfect for such companies because it lets them lease a virtual server that's scalable on an as-needed basis. This means that your hosting package can be adjusted on an ongoing basis according to how your traffic fluctuates -- something that all tech start-ups go through a lot of. With cloud hosting, you can also choose your preferred operating system and other infrastructure components. Such hosting packages are also typically self-service, billed hourly or monthly, and controlled via a web interface or API. This means that you'll need your own in-house IT team standing by to manage your cloud hosting package as your needs fluctuate. Of course, if you're a web-based start-up, you probably already have those resources standing by.

Choosing a Hosting Provider
Once you decide what kind of hosting you need, you have to choose an actual hosting provider. This can be tough because there are almost as many hosting-review sites out there as there are hosting providers. So once you choose the kind of hosting you need, start looking for reviews on that kind of hosting. After all, while some companies excel at offering one kind of hosting, they might not be so good at providing another.

Finally, if you have an IT team in-house, get them involved in the decision making process. After all, they're going to be dealing with configuring your servers, and will know what questions to ask different hosting providers to make sure that the provider's technology makes sense for you. Even though this might seem like inviting too many cooks into the kitchen, it can save you a lot of time, money, and frustration down the line.