Web hosting: what they are and how many classes exist

 

If you have ever considered setting up a website 'seriously' (for some professional project, for example) you will have asked yourself what you need to tell to get to it. In the first place, without a doubt, they will have told you about the domains, the Internet address that we use to access one or another web page or to send an e-mail to one or another user (genbeta.com, gmail.com, uned.es, un.org, etc).

But these domains are only a gateway to a certain series of contents. These contents HTML PHP code, images, animations must be located in a physical space, what we call 'hosting' or 'web hosting'. The files that make up our website are hosted on server disk drives, owned by our hosting providers, usually hosted in large data centers.

 

What accommodation do I choose then?

Our suppliers will not only offer us space for web archives, but also other complementary services such as sending emails, FTP access to facilitate the updating of the site, databases that allow us to install content managers (such as Wordpress panels configuration, etc. In almost all cases, we will also facilitate the reservation of domains, but if we wish we can use those of another provider.

Knowing that it is time to choose the type of hosting we want for our web project. It is possible that the first option we think of is a free hosting service, such as Blogspot, Wix or Weebly but, although interesting to take our first steps in website management, this type of hosting is usually lacking the functionalities and flexibility necessary to offer a professional web presence.

Let's review, therefore, what are the main categories in which web hosting is divided.

 

Home servers: what they are for and what they can do for you

1) Shared web hosting

The most economical, and therefore the one that most users opt for. This is because we share expenses sharing resources: our websites are hosted on the same server as those of other clients of the hosting provider (and therefore also share an IP address).

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It is the most recommended option for those websites without notable performance requirements and that do not usually have a very high number of monthly visits.

The problem is that, when sharing a server, the actions of our 'neighbors' will have an impact on us: if another client's website is used to send spam, their IP (which is also ours, remember) will start to swell blacklists Internet, resulting in Internet users having trouble accessing our website, or that the e-mails we send do not reach their destination.

2) VPS (Virtual Private Server)

If the shared hosting becomes the equivalent of sharing an apartment, with the VPS (an acronym for virtual private server we move on to a block of flats, in which the existence of common resources is not an obstacle to living with complete autonomy

The provider uses virtualization techniques to divide a physical server into several virtual servers, which compartmentalize the resources of the first and to which only we will have access. If your web project requires more resources and greater customization than shared hosting can provide, VPS is the option you should choose.

Of course: keep in mind that its cost will increase slightly (in most cases a basic VPS is still an economical option) but that the complexity to configure and maintain the server will go up several steps unless we pay extra for delegate this task.

Datacenters like the one in the photo can host every hundred servers (the machines that host the websites). Image: Pixabay.

3) Dedicated server

In this case, the block of flats has been shared in a villa for us alone. It is about that: a physical server that we do not have to share with any other client, which isolates you from any security breach that a third party may cause, and provides you with full access to the equipment configurations and the software installed on it.

Issue? The price, of course. So if your website does not have high-performance requirements you should not even consider this option.

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4) Cloud hosting

The accommodation in the cloud is an increasingly common option, although many providers still do not provide. Continuing with the housing parallels, it is like lacking a home but being able to have a tourist apartment in each city we visit even if each family member decides to travel separately. More or less.

The idea is that in reality our website will not be on a single server, but distributed among several interconnected servers. This allows resources to be adapted to the needs of each moment, so it is good to absorb sudden traffic peaks.

This option allows you to adjust the price more because you pay only for the services we use and not for preset packages, but still, their price is quite high, and they are not easy to manage.

 

One last thing to keep in mind In addition to the technology behind each of these accommodations, when choosing one or another offer we must take into account what they offer us.

Not because a VPS is a more advanced option than a shared hosting necessarily means that any VPS offer will offer more disk space, more databases or a larger volume of data transfer than a shared hosting offer.

We must take into account all these features (and several more) when assessing which is the best option for our website.