Which web site hosting service will be most suitable for me?

There are different types of web hosting solutions appropriate for different web portals in terms of the resources or the hosting environment they demand. To select the most adequate hosting service for your website, you need to judge what server-side software programs it requires, how many daily hits you expect at the beginning and in the future, as well as any other specific requirements that may have to be fulfilled.

Shared Web Space Hosting - Upsides

The best choice for small web sites with several hundred or webspace hosting, each customer pays only for their plan, which decreases the overall cost per person drastically. There are various web hosting packages differing from one hosting vendor to another, providing different amounts of storage space and monthly bandwidth, different email account quotas and so on. The good point is that you can buy an account that will offer the resources your web site indeed needs. You will not need to pay a lot of money for a package you will not avail of, or wind up with a small account that cannot host the web site. At 9 Cube Hosting, there is a large collection of shared hosting accounts appropriate for personal or small business web portals that even offer pre-installed script-driven systems such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal or WordPress - to render things easier. If you commence with a cheaper package and you require more system resources, moving to a more advanced plan demands only a click.

Shared Hosting - Weak Points

A downside of the shared web site hosting platform is that the web hosting servers have some software installed on them and you cannot activate additional software applications. Specific web sites, above all online stores, require applications to be activated on the web server for them to operate, and with a shared site hosting package, you can install solely software applications that do not require full root-level access.

Private Virtual Servers and Dedicated Web Servers

For websites that need complete root-level access, or if your web portal has many thousands or even 1 000 000's of hits per day, what you require is a VPS or a dedicated server. A virtual web server is a virtual emulation of a dedicated machine and it performs in exactly the same manner.

Virtual Private Hosting Servers

Both services usually offer full root-level access and can be rebooted through a software program by the user, independently from the hosting provider. Analogous to the shared web space hosting plans, the VPS web server hosting and the dedicated web server hosting plans sport diverse functionalities depending on what the web hosting vendor offers. A virtual web server package has guaranteed disk storage space, RAM and central processing unit usage quotas that can sometimes be extended for brief spells of time provided that there are unused resources on the physical machine. With a dedicated web hosting server, the only limit is the hardware it is utilizing, and it can be revved up by altering or adding components. A Virtual Private Server is easier to manage as it includes a virtualization console, which can be used to reboot it, to install software applications, monitor stats, etc. The management of a dedicated web hosting server is more complicated, so such a solution would rather be used by trained users.

Dedicated Web Hosting Servers

Nonetheless, some providers offer managed dedicated web server hosting services where they carry out hosting server administration operations on behalf of the customer. This can be included in the plan or an extra service.

Prior To Deciding...

Choosing the top hosting plan is essential as it can influence the proper functioning of a web portal. Prior to opting for a plan, weigh the pros and cons, survey carefully all the prerequisites for the site to work properly, especially if it is script-based, and, one more thing, if you have already chosen a host, the best thing to do would be to ask their customer support staff for an opinion as to which plan exactly would be best for the stable performance of your site.