The Internet has been around for quite a while but very few of us have been online for more than just a few years. I got my first start about 13 years ago on the Internet, a literal eternity as far as Internet age is concerned. It was at that time that I decided to start a business online and although things were different then, they were also similar in many ways.
At that particular time, there was only one place that you were able to buy a domain name and that was through networksolutions.com. A domain cost about $35, but now they are available in multiple places and many times you can get them for well under $10 each. I purchased the domain name without really knowing what to do with it and I needed to take a crash course on Web hosting. It was amazing how an enhanced my life.
The first type of hosting that I started out on was a shared server and I paid about $20 a month in order to have the service. A shared server is the most common type, as it allows many people to be physically located on the same server but yet still hold their own space that is separate from the others. Shared servers are not as expensive anymore, and you can usually find a good shared host for under five dollars a month.
My business eventually grew and the traffic that I was receiving to my website grew along with it. I needed a more robust server in order to handle the traffic that was coming my way and for this, I decided on a VPS. This stands for virtual Private server, and it is simply a way of saying that you are still sharing a server but that you will have a much larger chunk of the resources that are available. Most of these types of servers are only split among six or eight people.
As I added additional domains over the course of time, I also continued to purchase additional hosting as well. Most of the time, I would buy a shared server for my new domain name and then move it over to a virtual Private server as the domain began to grow and experience additional traffic. There were also times whenever I would move multiple domain names over one to the same virtual Private server, but I always made sure that each domain had its own IP address.
It didn’t take but a few years until my business grew to the point where I needed to go with a dedicated server. The hosting company that I was with allowed me to move my websites directly from the virtual Private server into a more robust, dedicated box. It allowed my business to grow and it continues to do so down to this day.
Is it going to take you a little bit of time to understand Web hosting? Of course it is, but the time that you spend understanding hosting and choosing a proper web host is going to enhance your business in a number of different ways. Don’t rush through this decision, as it is going to be a decision that you need to live with for the long term.