Web hosting is normally done either from the site owner’s private computer, or by employing the services of a web hosting company. Web hosting companies have many options and service levels to choose from.
When hosting a web site from a computer in your home or office, there are many things you have to consider. This was a viable option in the early days of the net, but now it’s far too dangerous. Hackers are on the hunt and never tire of looking for vulnerable web servers to vandalize. If you’re not 100% up to date on all of the necessary security patches, you leave your whole network open to attack.
Also, consider that by hosting from your own consumer or even business level ISP, you’d be giving up a lot of bandwidth just to share your site. If there was any kind of multimedia content on your page, this is generally not a good idea.
When you go with a web host, you can enjoy total security, backups of your data, no strain on your network, and more. Most small sites start out with what’s called “Shared Hosting” and which can cost as little as $1 a month to about $9 a month. Shared hosting means your site is shared from a computer that serves up many of the hosts customer’s websites. You may experience slowdowns if another website on your shared machine experiences spikes in popularity, but generally you’re pretty safe.
Virtual Private hosting offers much more stability. While still sharing a physical server, the server is split into virtual machines where each one gets a guaranteed distribution of resources, whether they use them or not. This way another site will never affect your site’s performance.
Dedicated web hosting is the best bet for sites where 100% uptime is a critical matter. Your site is on one dedicated machine and all of the resources are just for your site. This option is much more expensive than shared hosting, but the advantage is speed and more versatility with what kind of databases you can use and more.
Want to find out more about affordable reseller hosting, then visit Nathan Oulman’s site on how to choose the best cheap reseller web hosting for your needs.