Free Hosting, Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting - Which One is the Best For You?

You think about creating your web site in order to share on the Web your passions, to make known your company... That is relatively simple but it is still necessary not to skip the crucial step of hosting. To be indeed consulted by the public, your web site must be stored ("hosted") on a specific computer ("server") connected permanently to Internet network. For that, several solutions are offered to you:

Free hosting:

The service is more widespread in the personal pages because it is free and require no particular skills. The services are generally very comparable: a hosting in sub-domain like www.provider.com/you with tools of assistance to creation, a generous disk space to store your files, an email address, statistics and features to be integrated like forums, chats and surveys. The majority also enable you to integrate audio and video files. The exemption from payment of this service is however not without counterparts: the publicity which appears with Pop-up or an incompressible space reserved for the web hosting provider, very limited technical features, the slowness and frequent unavailability of the servers.

Not free hosting:

Although the free solution can appear tempting, it will quickly become a brake with the expansion of your web site. It is thus advisable to define the vocation of the web site as a preliminary, your requirements in term for capacity for space, traffic, of the computer programming languages which you wish to develop,... According to that, it will be perhaps more judicious to annually invest a few tens of dollars in a professional hosting of quality. You would profit in addition from a customer support quite present, wide features (choice of the types of databases, operating system of the server, languages scripts), options of safeguard and generally of a hosting which can be evolutionary.

The Shared Hosting, which is intended for small sites, remains a solution with low costs accessible to all without any hardware or software concern. It is acted in fact of a disk space which you rent on one of the machines of the web hosting provider. The only constraints come from the division even of the resources (power of the machine and band-width) between several customers which can cause decelerations.

But on a certain level of traffic, the important customers are generally directed towards a solution of Dedicated Hosting. In this case, you rent a complete server and thus profit from a total freedom to develop the wished technologies, to install software while benefiting from the infrastructure of the hosting provider. Many advantages but also of heavy responsibilities since all the administration network is under your responsibility. This solution will therefore be considered at a later stage, when the system will no longer have any secrets for you.

If the providers are numerous, the good choice of hosting depends entirely on you according to the type of web site which you wish to put online, of your competences too. It is thus important to define your needs well and to study all the offers attentively. And before signing your contract of hosting, read very carefully all the terms of your engagement!

J. Stark