Free, Shared or Dedicated: Which Type of Hosting Is Right For You?

There are basically three ways to host your web site: free web hosting, shared web site hosting and a dedicated server. Which one is right for YOUR web site? Here are some guidelines to help you decide.

Free Web Hosting

When you choose free web hosting you are basically getting a folder on someone else's hosting account. They will create a "subdomain" where you can store your web site files. It will have a web address like:

http://your-user-name.free-host.com

If you wish to you can purchase a domain name and forward that domain to your free host. You can choose to mask the real domain name or not. More about that in a minute.

The drawbacks to free web hosting are:

• Limited storage space and bandwidth - your free host is sharing his own space and bandwidth, so he can only give you a small portion of his total.
• Limits on what you can do with the account - you probably will not be able to install any scripts (it's not your server, after all) and you may be limited on images, forms and other interactive features of your site. You may not be able to use the free hosting account for ecommerce.
• Your host will place his own ads on your site - the ads will be targeted to the content on your site, so they may well be your competitors' ads, but you will have no control over this because those ads are the way your host pays for your free hosting.
• Masked or unmasked: that is the question - as we mentioned before, you will have a long, obviously free and therefore not very professional domain name. To help this situation, you can choose to purchase your own domain name and point it to your free host. If you mask the "real" domain name you can set your own keywords and description for your site, but there are two downsides to this scenario:
• • All of your web pages will have the same keywords and descriptions, which does not help you with the search engines; and
  • No matter what page your visitors are on, they will always see your main domain page URL, i.e. http://your-domain.com. Therefore if they want to bookmark a page so they can come back to that information or pass it along to a friend, they will always be bookmarking your home page.
• No email accounts - you will not be able to create email accounts with you@your-domain.com addresses unless you purchase email as an add-on from your domain registrar.

Shared Web Site Hosting

Shared web site hosting is the most common hosting solution for small businesses. Shared hosting means that several web sites share the file storage and bandwidth from a single server. Shared hosting accounts are available in a variety of sizes and prices. Most are very reasonably priced and can be easily upgraded should your site or traffic require it.

Shared web hosting is the least expensive way to get a yourdomain.com web address. An account can usually be set up in a matter of minutes, ready for your web pages to be uploaded to the server.

In shared web site hosting all the technical details of the server are taken care of by the hosting company. This would include installing the operating system and web server software updates, monitoring the server 24/7 for problems and rebooting the server when necessary, performing site backups and more.

Customers are responsible for uploading their own web site files, configuring any scripts, installing applications like blogs, forums and calendars and shopping carts and for creating the databases necessary to run these applications. Many shared hosting providers offer cPanel or another graphical interface to help non-technical users manage these tasks along with training videos to show how to use the tools.

A good shared hosting provider will make it easy for you to create POP3 and IMAP email accounts (you@yourdomain.com) and provide a web interface for accessing your email. It should also provide easy access to your web site statistics through AWstats, Webalizer or another graphical server log analysis tool.

All in all, shared web hosting provides an economical way to do business on the Internet.

Recommended Shared Hosting Provider:

Techkat Hosting - World Class Equipment - Personal Service

Dedicated Server

Very large or very high volume web sites, or sites running proprietary or secure applications require a dedicated server. A dedicated server is a server that is leased from the web hosting company and ONLY contains your web site. Often times the hosting company will build a server to the customer's specifications, offering choices of operating system, processor chip, amount of RAM, size of hard drive(s), etc. The customer can then choose whether to manage the server himself or have the hosting company manage it for him at additional cost.

Sites that require a dedicated server would include:

• Very large sites (with pages numbering in the hundreds)
• Very high volume sites (with traffic numbering in the thousands of page views per day)
• Sites that use large databases (like stores with hundreds of products)
• Corporate intranet servers that have high volume and secure information

Prices for dedicated servers run in the hundreds to thousands of dollars per month, but often include 100% uptime guarantees. If you are earning a lot of money with your web site, the cost will be more than offset by the extra speed and reliability that come with a dedicated hosting solution.

Recommended Dedicated Hosting Provider:

Techkat Hosting is proud to partner with Rackspace for all of your high-volume applications like managed servers, dedicated servers and scalable solutions requiring absolute reliability. They GUARANTEE 100% Uptime! Please contact Kathy at Techkat Hosting at 817-485-2829.