If you plan to have a business website to offer goods and services online, you will need a good web hosting provider for the same to work. Nowadays, there are countless options available in the market. While searching for website hosting services, you will come across three options:
1) Dedicated server
2) shared web hosting
3) co-location
Once you start looking for business website hosting, you will see a number of ads and links that claim to be the best. These may vary from free web hosting and cheap web hosting to expensive packages. It’s best to focus on what you really need for your business requirements and ignore the hype.
Dedicated server hosting is that which allows you to rent the entire web server for hosting your website. This is a good solution for webmasters who lack the startup capital to buy their own server. You get control over the disk space and file transfer capacity available for your website. Dedicated servers also provide faster internet connections. The disadvantages to using this top quality web hosting service is the high cost involved and lesser control available as compared to co-location web hosting.
Shared web hosting is a type of hosting where you rent disk space on a large server along with many other sites. It is the most affordable form of web hosting and has many features and options for all kinds of business websites. However, it lacks the quality found in dedicated or co-location web hosting. You may lose sales when the server goes down and your site may not be very secure.
Co-location web hosting is that wherein your server equipment is located in a secure state of the art facility in the web host’s location. A big advantage of this type of web hosting is that it provides you with total control over the reliability and data transfer speed of your web site. It can be tough to beat the quality of service available in co-location web hosting but it can prove to be very expensive for start-up ventures.