Rambling Thoughts

Types of hosting

Posted on 22. Feb, 2009 by Nikhil Sheth in Knowledge

Recently, I had quite a few queries from people regarding type of hosting they should opt for. Some of them had to put personal site, some had to put some web applications online and so on.Not going in too much of technical details, here is the list of basic types of hosting options available:

1. Shared Hosting

   Shared hosting means just that. Your website is hosted on a server shared by other websites. The advantage of this setup is the shared cost.

   The biggest disadvantage of a shared hosting account is that you’re at the mercy of the other sites on your server. A really popular site may adversely affect the performance of your own site. On the other hand, if
   you’re the most popular site on the server, you get to use a super server for a very low price.

2. Grid / Cloud Hosting

   Grid or Cloud Hosting refers to a fairly new hosting technology that lets hundreds of individual servers work together so that it looks like one giant server. The idea is that as the need grows, the hosting company can just add more commodity hardware to make an ever larger grid or cloud.

   Price Range: All grid computing packages use some form of pay-for-what-you-use pricing structure.

3. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

   Virtual private servers share one physical server but acts like multiple, separate servers. A VPS is a stepping stone between shared hosting and getting your own dedicated machine. Even though each VPS instance shares hardware resources, they are allocated a dedicated slice of the computing resources.

   A VPS avoids the problem of having your hosting neighbors bring down your website, while avoiding the cost of a dedicated server.

4. Dedicated Server

   When you have a dedicated server, it means you are renting one physical server from a hosting company. You can have full control (called “root” permissions in Linux) if you want it.

5. Colocation

   When you colocate, you rent rack space from a data center. You bring in your own server hardware and they provide power, cooling, physical security, and an internet uplink. This means you’re responsible for your own server software, data storage, backup procedures, etc. If hardware fails, you’re responsible for replacing it and getting the server back up and running.

   Unless you have the technical know-how in-house, colocation is probably not worth the investment in time, expertise, and money for most small businesses.

6. Self Service

   The ultimate hosting plan — you do it all yourself! You buy the servers, install and configure the software, make sure there is sufficient cooling and power in your machine room, and double up everything for redundancy. Some of the things you’ll have to take care of:

• data center space
• cooling
• power (with backup)
• bandwidth
• server hardware
• systems administrator
• data integrity and backup
  … and the list goes on.

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4. FaceBook has 30,000 servers and serves 600,000 images per second!
5. Play Detective With URLInfo

Tags: Hosting