3 of 3

Write now Article Tools

If you're looking for web hosting, the options available to you may be bewildering. There are a number of choices and different companies use different names for them, which can make it a challenge to determine what would be the best fit for your plans.

There are three levels of hosting offered by most web hosting companies today. In order of level of control, these are:

*shared hosting

*virtual private servers (VPS)

*dedicated servers and colocation.

Shared hosting is what most people think of when they think of web hosting, the simple rental of a directory on a server, sharing the server's resources with many other users. With shared hosting users are restricted to the software the hosting company provides and are in competition for the resources of the machine.

Dedicated servers and colocated servers are entire physical machines the user controls, the difference being in the ownership of the machine. In the case of a dedicated system the hosting company owns the machine and the user effectively rents it from them. Colocated servers are owned by the user, who is renting rack space and buying bandwidth from the hosting company.

VPS is a middle ground. The user doesn't control the physical machine, but does have control of a fixed share of its resources. With a VPS, the user can install whatever software they want and configure the system however they like. For example, most shared plans come with MySQL, PHP and Perl. If the user would prefer something else, they're out of luck. With a VPS, the user can install PostgreSQL or Python or Ruby on Rails if they choose. A VPS can be used as a mail server, application server or for storage or anything else the user wants to use it for, the same as they could with a dedicated or colocated server.

Because they have a fixed share of resources, they aren't at the mercy of some other user taking up all the bandwidth or CPU cycles as can happen on shared servers. But because they only have access to a fraction of the resources of the host system resource-intensive processes may not run as well as they would on a dedicated server.

Anyone considering VPS hosting should ask the hosting companies they're considering a few questions beyond price and amount of disk space included in the plan. Find out the specification for the host system:

*CPU type and speed

*Underlying OS

*How many accounts total will be on that host

*How upgrades are handled if the plan you initially sign up for later proves insufficient

For those who need more control and customization than is possible with a shared hosting account, but not needing a full system, VPS may be a good fit.

Learn more about this author, Eileen Grace.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about What is a virtual private server (VPS)??
We want to hear your view. Write now!