Website Hosting Options

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What are the common website hosting types?

In terms of website hosting, there are currently four main options.

• Shared hosting: This is the most common and also the most affordable. So, websites are basically sharing a server all on one huge server. They don't know each other, they're not related, and it's all separate customers just all sharing a server. This is usually the most affordable.
• Dedicated server: That's going to be a server that's just for your website or your group of websites that you own. So for a really, really big website like The New York Times website, they probably have a few dedicated servers just because there's so much traffic, but it's also good because it's more secure. It also prevents any downtime for your website if that's a big concern.
• Cloud hosting: This is the newest option. This is when your website is hosted on the cloud, which means several different servers and computers are hosting the website equally, so that leads to a lot less downtime.
• CMS specific hosting: This is a lot like shared hosting, but it is only for specific CMS's. Suppose you had a WordPress site and you had CMS specific hosting for other WordPress sites. This helps the developers and whoever is monitoring the servers to make sure that if there's any developments or updates with the CMS, that it's better controlled since it's all one CMS on that host.

Benefits and limitations of hosting options

Here you can see the main attributes of the hosting options. They’re ranked from 1 (being the top for that section), to 4 (the lowest). So, as you can see, dedicated obviously has the most benefits, but it's also the most expensive, and then cloud is basically in the middle with CMS specific, and then shared is going to be the best option for affordability and support.