Different types of Web Hosting Services Explained - Shared, Dedicated, VPS

Starting out with your website and do not know where to host it. Getting confused by different Server Types and hosting plans? 

If so, don't feel bad as you are not alone. Hosting is one of those beasts with so many options that anyone could get confused/lost in what type of hosting would be good for them, even the web developers with plentiful of experience could get confused in trying to find the right choice for them.

This post is to help you understand what is hosting server and its main types that you would be using for hosting your website.

A hosting server, or simply a web server, is a computer that is able to publicize your website to whole world. It is connected to a network that would allow anyone with Internet access to connect with it. Normally Servers are used to host some type of Internet service that is to be accessible to the world.  These machines provide you space to place your website and make it accessible via the World Wide Web. The most common web servers provided by hosting companies that you will come across are:

Shared Hosting Server, or simply shared server, is a type on which multiple websites reside on the same machine. You can think of it as a apartment building, multiple groups live under the same roof where one's living style would affect the other, in case of Shared hosting the groups are websites and the roof is single Computer system connected to the Internet.

Shared servers are very cheap in comparison to other hosting servers but that is what makes them one of the most used/bought server type. You are able to make your website accessible to the internet users at a very cost effective rate. 

On this type of server website loading speed and performance depends on other websites alongside it. If they are more accessed then your website performance will be decreased, on the other hand if your website is more accessed and popular then the other hosted sites performance will decrease.

Having dedicated hosting server means you are renting out a complete machine from hosting company. It is like you own the machine and you can do what you want to it. You will have the administrative access to the machine and could have hardware added to it which would be needed. It is like owning a town where you could make many houses in each you could do modifications as you want to and no one would be there to interfere. In other words you will have the machine all to yourself and you could host one or many different websites/web-services on it.

With a dedicated hosting server you need not to worry about other sites taking your resources, interfering with your website performance or anything like that as only your website is running on it so all the resources of the system are at its disposal. Dedicated servers are the highest level of server you could get when your online business is blooming and you don't want other sites to affect its performance.

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. As the name suggests it is not really a physical machine. Multiple VPS are hosted on same machine but in sense of their working and environment they are separate entities. It is like a town where there are many houses, each is independent of the other and none interfere with what the other does.

These are virtual machines created on a physical computer system using a virtualization layer to provide the users with more freedom of customization. Each VPS will have its own memory(RAM), CPU and network capabilities. Multiple VPS running on same machine do not interfere with each other performance and they are managed by a Hypervisor. It is duty of this hypervisor to keep the VPS in check and if service on any VPS is trying to exceed the allocated resources it will be down till its resource usage is decreased and then it will start working again.