Seven Different Types of Hosting Services You Need to Know About

If you are going to manage a website, it is important to understand the different kinds of data your website will be handling. Beyond the usual kind of data, the term big data has also become quite common.

Big data is an umbrella term used to define data sets that are so complex and large that traditional data applications cannot manage to handle them. This makes it difficult for traditional processing applications to analyze, search, curate, capture, share, store, secure, transfer and visualize the data.

The ‘big’ in big data is as a result of three main reasons:

• Quantity of the data: This is when the data sets involve huge amounts of data that may have accumulated over years or due to a vast number of users contributing to an overall large amount of data within a short span of time. The quantity of data that goes through systems is constantly increasing these days because data storage is becoming cheaper and more accessible.
• Speed of data streaming: Due to the efficiency of technology and services offered by most vendors, the speed of data transfers has increased and, therefore, the number of micro transactions that need to be processed in real-time has also increased.
• Complexity of data: When data is in different formats e.g. text, audio, video, financial transactions etc., it requires more sophistication to be able to manage its complexity.

After you know what kind of data your website will be handling, you then need to understand the type of hosting service that will suit your needs. Depending on the type of website and its purpose, the optimum needs will most probably evolve with time. Your data may evolve from being normal data into big data.

It is important that you get a hosting service that has the scalability to be able to adjust to your needs. For most websites, it is safe to assume that your needs within the first six months will be modest. However, thereafter, depending on how you promote your website or the general traffic that goes through your website, your needs will begin to increase exponentially.

The main signs that begin to show that your website is not on an optimum hosting service include sluggishness and a lot of downtime. Below are the different types of hosting services available.

1. Shared Hosting

This is the most common type of webhosting service. It is common because it is usually cost-effective due to sharing of the resources required to host a website. To be specific, one server is used to host several different websites, which then share the same resources on one server machine.

Hosting companies that offer shared servers or shared hosting services usually have one or several super servers to manage the load of hundreds of different websites, and they can, therefore, afford to charge $1 to $20 for the service.

The biggest drawback of a shared hosting service is that if one of the websites hosted on such a server begins to hog resources due to Web traffic, the other websites immediately suffer.

If you are new to website creation, this is often the best platform to use in order to learn how hosting services work.

2. Reseller Hosting

These are often shared hosting services with extra management tools to help a user who wants to resell many different hosting spaces have more control over each of the different clients he/she resells to.

The greater technical control is managed through an advanced control panel, advanced billing software, access to private name servers and such benefits to help a user manage several other accounts.

In essence, a reseller hosting service can give you the capability to act as a shared hosting service and, therefore, resell hosting services to other customers.

3. Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a fairly new Web hosting technology where several different Web servers are put together in a sort of grid and, therefore, act as one huge server. The idea behind this concept is that, as the needs of a cloud hosting service increase, all the cloud hosting service has to do is to plug in new hardware to the grid in order to give the overall grid more capacity.

Cloud hosting services can often manage big data very well because the systems are often sophisticated enough to manage complex data in large quantities.

4. Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting Service

A VPS is like a shared hosting service, but with specific resources allocated from a single server to manage each specific website. Therefore, each specific website in a VPS is managed as if it was being hosted by its own server. This helps a user avoid the major bottleneck of shared hosting, which is one website affecting all other websites on the same server.

The pricing of VPS hosting services is primarily dependent and based on the guaranteed CPU and memory resources that will be apportioned to your website.

5. Dedicated Server

A hosting service that offers a dedicated server simply means that you are renting a single server machine to host all your data. This means that you have full access and control of the server and your data in the dedicated server.

Most dedicated servers often require a dedicated system administrator to manage any issues that happen to the server.

6. Collocation

A collocation service simply means that you purchase your own server and take it to a location where you share a physical building with other servers. This means that you will be responsible for managing the server’s software and hardware needs including backups and redundancies. The collocation service will only offer you the rack space, Internet service, electricity, physical security and cooling.

7. Personal Hosting

If you have the technical know-how, you could also host your own website and data. You will need to take care of your server, Internet software; backup data, backup power and everything else necessary to have your data and websites live all the time throughout the year.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Seven Different Types of Hosting Services You Need to Know About

Larry B. Jackson has been a web developer for the last seven years. He has used a variety of different Web hosting services over the years and recommends https://inexpensivewebhosting.reviews to help his clients make the best choice to suit their needs.

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