A decent website requires the appropriate hosting where your pages, images, style sheets and many other auxiliary files will reside at the visitors’ disposal. When you try decide upon the hosting server, you become confused by glitzy advertisements, where each one attempt to promise you the best benefits on the earth.
The semi-experts make it more cryptic, by pronouncing jargon like dedicated hosting, shared hosting, unique IPs, which start keep on dancing on your brain. Let us try to go for a quick overview.
An web server is a machine that provides space to you at a stipulated rate on periodic basis.
You may be amazed to know that even the machine at your residence may work as a web server, provided you can keep it up and running for 24×7 and it has got an internet connection. In general, when you go for any broadband internet connection or Leased Line, you are allocated a dedicated IP. Precisely, IP is the unique identification number that denotes your server to the world at large. A dedicated IP means, none other than you can use that number.
You can test whether the hosting provider has really offered you a dedicated IP very easily. Instead of typing http://www.skillwebscholl.com, type http://74.50.21.200. If you find your website is opened when you are calling by IP, you may be rest assured that you are enjoying a dedicated IP.
However, The web server may host a single website or a large number of websites. When you book the server, the provider may allocate a complete server exclusively for you or he may offer you a shared portion. If the complete server is allocated to you, you call it a dedicated hosting else, you call it a shared hosting. There is also another type that is the perfect compromise between the shared and dedicated hosting, which is called Virtual Private Server or VPS.
You can certainly understand that dedicated server costs you much higher than the shared server.
In reality, if a shared hosting costs you around $20 per year, the dedicated server costs you $4000 per year. The VPS costs you around $1250 per year.
The cost varies widely due to the facilities, bandwidth, software availability and many other features.
If you want to launch a generic website, any shared hosting would suffice. If your application demands high level of security and expects very high traffic turnover, you should go for VPS or Dedicated Server.
It completely depends upon you and your exclusive requirements. So, don’t be carried away by glitters.
