Dedicated Hosting can also be called, dedicating hosting service, dedicated server hosting, managed dedicated hosting and unmanaged dedicated hosting. Under these various names is usually the same type of hosting service but may comes with different options, features and prices from different vendors.

Dedicated hosting is a service whereby the web hosting provider leases or rent a whole computer equipped with the necessary hardware, software and connection to the Internet. This different from Shared Web hosting as it's not a hosting space or account among many on one server. Instead, it's an entire server under the control of the customer. These servers are often housed in a data center where it can be supported by various necessary facilities, such as UPS (Uninterruptible power supply), backbone connection to the Internet, backup solutions and more.

What's in the Dedicated Server?

Most reputable Web hosting providers choose their dedicated server hardware carefully. Although they tend to balance costs to provide a competitive package, they usually do good job of providing a reliable server. Customer opting for this plan, tend to pay more than any other hosting plans, so they are usually well looked after. Specs of the server hardware vary from one hosting provider to another, so check and compare before you buy.

The operating server of choice for many web hosts is usually Linux due to it popular reputation of speed and stability. However, many hosting providers also offer Windows server hosting. Along with a pre-installed operating system, web hosts also offer a range of features that's bundled with dedicated server plan, such as free domain name, dedicated IP Address, Control Panel, Backup, SSH (Secure Shell), SSL Certificate among other features. The features included are usually detailed in the dedicated hosting package and usually billed monthly. Some web hosts allows discounts for customers willing to pay yearly.

Types of Dedicated Hosting

Depends on the hosting package and web hosting provider you decide to go with, the involvement of the hosting service provider may vary. There are 2 common types: Managed Dedicated Hosting and Unmanaged Dedicated hosting. The managed hosting is where you delegate most if not all of server tasks such patches, security fixes and maintenance to the hosting provider. Where unmanaged is where you get to do most of that yourself. Unmanaged server hosting is a lot of work and unless there is good reason to want to do those server tasks yourself, I suggest you sign up for managed hosting.

Dedicated Hosting Benefits

The main 2 benefits of dedicated hosting is complete control over the web hosting server and high performance. Besides, administrators can install the applications they need, access the server via Secure Shell and even reboot remotely. Other advantages that comes with dedicating hosting is security. This means the server can be locked down in many aspects to ensure data integrity and availability. Backup is usually included as part of the backup meaning data can be backup on routine basis and restored in quickly if the server fails for some reason.

Conclusion

Dedicated server hosting provides power, performance, security, flexibility among other features to those willing to pay for the privilege. It's an ideal hosting service for individuals and companies looking to host high demanding web solutions for their organisation or other customers. Although dedicated server is more expensive than Shared web hosting and other plans, priced at around $70 per month, it does provide various hosting advantages not offered by other web hosting types.

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In this post, I will review what Shared Web Hosting service provides. In other words, what should you expected to be in a typical shared web hosting package, Pros, Cons and things you should be aware of when taking a shared hosting plan.

So what's shared web hosting?

In simple terms, it's a hosting account or a disk space in a server connected to the Internet, where other user accounts are also present.

Why Shared Web Hosting is one of the most popular web hosting plans out there?

- It's cheap
- Provides a control panel such as cPanel, Ensim, DirectAdmin, Plesk and more
- Pre-installed features
- Free domain
- No need to worry about server patches or fixes
- Technical Support included

OK, let me go into details into what each of the above means.

Cheap Shared Web Hosting:

Shared hosting is cheap because hosting providers places many customer accounts into one server connected to the Internet. This way, 1 server is able to consolidate allocated spaces for accounts into several partitions on the same server. Doing so, allows the web hosting provider to save on hardware, licenses, administration and resources and therefore provide affordable web hosting plans. Some will be as low as $2 a month. Some web hosts even offer discount when taking annual plans.

Shared Hosting Control Panel:

A web hosting control panel allows managing various web hosting space features. Back in the days, all actions preformed on a web hosting account has to be done via shell by typing a lot of commands. Fortunately, with the advance of hosting control panels, it has not become very easy to do various tasks on web hosting account with a few clicks.

Pre-Installed Features:

There are many and different features depending on the web hosting provider you decide to go with. All the features should be available via a control panel. Just to give you an idea, here is a print screen of my personal favourite: cPanel control panel.

As you can see there many pre-installed features that's usually available once your web hosting account is activated. Following are some of the features can be easily configured from cPanel control panel: File Management, email, MySQL Databases, Sub domains, Addon Domains, Website Stats and much more at a click of button. Each option usually have details on what it does.

Free domain name:

Not all shared web hosting providers offer free domain name, but most does. Some even offers a free domain forever. Which means, you don't have to pay the domain yearly renewal fee as this is covered as part of the web hosting account.

There are other hosting control panels out there, but I've provided cPanel example here because it's one of the easiest to work here in my opinion.

No hosting server patches or fixes to worry about:

Having to keep up with various patches, fixes and system security vulnerabilities is a lot of work. Delegating this task to your web hosting provider is ideal for many reasons. For starters, most web hosts know their business well and have dedicated teams of experts on the subject. So looking after the web hosting server is just part of their daily tasks, while if you are an individual or a small company, it can become a strain on your resources. Also, when the web hosts covers this side of the administration, you can focus on growing you content, visitors, business or whatever you are looking to gain from your website.

Technical Support:

Web hosting technical support is very helpful especially for beginners that need guidance or support on how to do various things. Most web hosting companies will highlight this part of the service as their key differentiator, although support delivery and experience may vary from one web host to another.

As you can see, there is a lot to be said for shared web hosting, hence it's the most popular option for individuals and companies alike. However, there are some cons to shared web hosting. Most are relevant to large and demanding organisations, but there are drawbacks you should be aware of.

Share Hosting Cons:

- Custom applications may not be supported by the web hosting provider or can not be installed.

- Single IP address for the server is shared among all user accounts.

- SSL - Secure Socket Layer certificate not available or shared with other accounts for a cost. SSL is required if you are running an e-commerce website and collecting credit card information or other sensitive details. It ensure that a transactions between the client computer and hosting server is encrypted.

- Security related issues as there are many user accounts on the same hosting server.
Most reputable web hosts do a good job of ensuring this doesn't happen, but it can be an issue.

- Performance issues if your account happens to be hosted on a server where there are more user accounts than should be. Most web hosts, monitors the performance of their servers and will take action if they notice resource degradation issues on a server. However, on some cases, it may need to be reported for them to take notice.

- No backups. Most shared hosting servers are not backed up, although some hosting providers run a routine backup, but if it's outlined in the contract, web hosts will not have the obligation to restore your data or content in case of disaster. This can be easily cover by doing your own routine backup using the provided control panel. If it's not available, I suggest you ask for it before you sign up.

I've tried to cover all the plus point as well as drawbacks of shared web hosting, but if you think there are any more I should add, please let me know by using the comments option.

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This is a brief definition of free web hosting service offered by some web hosting providers.

A quick search on google for the term "Free Web Hosting" returns over 96.2 million results., at the time of writing this article Of course, not all the sites returned actually offers web hosting service, but it just goes to show how popular is the scheme. So what is free web hosting? what is available and what's not? are there any catches?

Free web hosting is a service offered by some companies across the web to those looking to host a typical small web site or blog for no cost. As it's free, it attracts many individuals who are not looking to pay to make their content available on the web. There are many downsides to free webhosting, such as not having your own http://www.mydomain.com/, ads on your pages from companies which you may not agree with, speed of loading pages and more.

What's available on a free web hosting account and what's not?

Typically, the free web hosting provider allows for a small hosting space where content can be placed to be available on the web. The address provided is usually a child domain or sub domain of the web hosting provider domain name, such as yoursite.hostingprovider.com or www.hostingprovider.com/~yoursite.

Free web hosting provider usually doesn't allow an email account to be associated with the account and if they do, the number of emails offered will be usually limited to 1. There is also bandwidth and hosting space restrictions, which mean you can only have a limited number of content and if your online venture grows and your site starts to generate many visitors, your site may be suspended for exceeding the specified bandwidth or the number of times your content has been be downloaded and viewed.

There are also limitations on web applications and scripting languages you can run such as PHP and ASP. Almost all free web hosting providers I've seen doesn't allow these to run or even be hosted on the assigned server space. Instead, free web hosts allows for simple HTML with images to be hosted or have a built-in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software that allows you to type or copy and paste content for publishing.

Free web hosting catches

One would wonder why a web hosting provider will spare the time, money, bandwidth, server space and various other resources to cater for a FREE web hosting account?

As with everything in life, nothing is free, and what's free usually have a hidden cost or a catch. With this in mind, following are a few you might expect to see:

For starters, instant activation is not possible with almost all free web hosts. This is because free web hosting accounts can be exploited for malicious purpose. Most web hosting providers run advertisements on free hosting accounts to make a return on what's being offered for free. Some ads can be explicit or for stuff you may not want visitors to see in your account, or it may appear as you have allowed for them. The worst ones are pop-ups or very large flashing banners that destruct visitors to your content. As it's a free account, most web host will have a very strict and sometimes unfair terms in their fine print to shut your account without prior notice or good cause, and it's not a lot you can do about it.

Conclusion

Free web hosting could be a temporary why of publishing content online or experimenting with the web without having to pay for a supported hosting solutions. However, this is not a good option in the long run in my opinion for individuals or companies looking to publish a lot of content without restrictions and draw backs of free web hosting. Shared web hosting solutions is good and cheaper alternative.

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Since I will be blogging about web hosting servers and service basics, tips and tricks, hosting guide and more, I though I will kick off with a basic definition of web hosting.

In order to better grasp the concept of web hosting, it's important to get a little history behind it. Don't worry, I won't bore you with a lot of details as I will keep things short and skip to the basics quickly.

When more than one computer became inter-connected and needed to serve files containing various information, the web is born. Web hosting started when individuals and organisations needed a server to host files that can be served to the web. A server is a computer running a system capable of serving files over the web to other computers. Serving files requires the use of a protocol. Just like we need a common language to talk to each other, computers need a protocol to be able to exchange information. There are many Internet protocols available for this purpose. The most popular is HTTP.

The server I mentioned, has the advantage of being well connected to the Internet and capable of running an OS and software to "serve" files, such as HTML, images, PDFs...etc to computers requesting those files using a browser, such as Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome. Now, why wouldn't people or companies host those files themselves? keeping in mind that computers are very cheap nowadays and many Operating Systems flavours capable of running a hosting service are free?

Running a web server is more than just installing an Operating System such Linux or Windows on a server. Beside requiring backbone connection to the Internet, which means being well connected and able to serve files on high bandwidth, they need to be maintained on many aspects; pacthes, security updates, backup to name back a few. This means that there was a need to an organisation or individuals where this service can be assigned to while companies can focus on their core business.

Since than, many companies have appeared around the world offering web hosting services. Now, web hosting service is a pretty broad name. In other words, there are many types of web hosting services that is on offer. It starts from free web hosting, shared hosting, virtual private hosting, e-commerce hosting and dedicated hosting. I'll go into more details on each hosting type on a different post, since details on these types area little beyond the scope of web hosting definition and requires a dedicated post.

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