I have been thinking on this topic for a while and have come up with a couple easy steps to figuring out what will be the best hosting solution for you.
Firstly you will need to ask yourself these questions.
- What can I afford?
- How big of an application / website am I going to run?
- What level of traffic are you expecting / have?
- What is your technical knowledge of administrating servers?
- What kind of application / site are you running (Terms and Conditions may prevent you from doing some...)
These five questions should really help you decide in what to go with. So now ill go in depth and explain each portion. Aft ert this ill explain the differences in the different types of hosting.
- Shared Host / Grid Hosting
- VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server)
- Dedicated Server
Yes there are other hosting types that exit, but to not complicate this decision more ill leave that for another post. I have been round robin with several different hosts now. Each I have found things I like, and things I do not like about them. So with my research and sit back and enjoy. As a side note this will be a two part post as I want to go into details about each host that I will review.
1) How much can I afford?
Pricing is everything in this decision. It decides what level of service you can handle while it doesnt mean if you have thousands of dollars or tens of thousands that you can afford to invest in the end you might not even need that much horse power.
For instance I run a small site with about ten our sites. Most of which are WordPress blogs and a couple custom CMS solutions (including this site.) Because of this I have found myself utilizing a Shared Host. Partly I am utilizing this route is because I cannot afford a VPS solution or even a dedicated server yet.
What are the price ranges?
- $2-$20 a month. (Shared Hosting / Grid Hosting)
- $15-$1000's a month (VPS Hosting 'Virtual Private Server')
- $30-$10,000's a month (Dedicate Server)
So as you can seen the pricing per month after Shared Hosting goes up in a WIDE range. Basically the way it works is that Shared hosts you can get the following.
Shared Hosts
- Unlimited Disk Space
- Unlimited Bandwith
- Unlimited Basically Everything...
While this may seem great there is some down sides about this.
- Limited number of inodes (this is the number of files / directories. Usually around 250,000 which is seriously difficult to hit.)
- Throttling (Some shared hosts may throttle you depending on how much bandwith you use.)
- Terms and Conditions (These often limit certain types of Web Applications and Web site types. So it is important to understand what you are doing.)
- E-Mail limitations (If you do email marketing most hosts throttle your emails and even could cancel your account if you ever get flagged for spamming.)
If none of those are a problem for you Shared Hosting may be perfect for you! However if it is an issue which I am finding in my web applications most of the Terms and Conditions are getting in the way of a few projects I want to do.
VPS Hosts / Dedicated Server
Hosts tend to cost more depending on:
- Bandwith
- Disk Space
- RAM
- CPU (Proccesor)
Depending on the host you go with each will handle the above differently in their pricing structure. I will talk about these more in my next set of posts. As I have said before each company has different methods of pricing structures.
2) How big of an application / website am I going to run?
This question is somewhat difficult to answer. Basically the question is relating to how heavy of an application / website you are running. If you are running the following you should be on a low end:
- Blog / WordPress Site
- Static Site (HTML Pages no dynamic content.)
- Some Dynamic Content / Pages.
- Small level of dynamic content system (CMS.)
This would constatute for a smaller solution. Anything possibly larger than this might require a slightly larger hosting solution. Now if this doesn't answer your question here is a few more.
What kind of a site?
- Photography
- Dance / Art
- Hobby
- Company Brochure Site
- etc...
These all could easily use a Shared Host several times over.
3) What level of traffic are you expecting / have?
This will greatly decide what type of host you go with. If you have well over a quarter of a million hits a month or even 10-20,000 hits a month you might consider something other than a Shared Host. Shared hosts tend to throttle bandwith to make sure your site does not affect the other sites on the same server. While a good host will have multiple server clustered together to prevent throttling, even the best at some point will tell you its time to upgrade...
- 1-10,000 Easily can handle a Shared Host.
- 20,000-50,000 Shared host can still handle but to what degree I am unsure.
- 20,000-100,000+ VPS or Dedicated Server.
This is not necessarilly a large deciding factor, but it might help in the event you have a large amount of traffic and you do not want to get throttled in a "Shared Hosting Environment."
4) What is your technical knowledge of administrating servers?
If you have a Sysadmin on staff or someone who is EXTREMELY well versesed in servers you might find your costs of running a dedicated server getting very cheap! While not as cheap as a shared host, a out of the box nothing included server can start as cheap as $30 a month. But if you have very little knowledge in this a VPS all setup host may be a better route. These require very little technical know how, but some level of understanding how to setup your site with Domains and such.
Technical knowledge basically means you understand how to install the entire website environment. LAMP Stack for instance is one of the environments a website like the one you are viewing runs on: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP to run this site. Installing all of this is not over the top difficult and has a lot of tutorials, but is definitely not for a novice to attempt.
5) What kind of application / site are you running?
We somewhat hit this question previously, but I need to rephrase it slightly. Basically most hosts have their own specific Terms and Conditions. These tend to prohibit certain types of websites.
For example RPG 'muds' in most shared hosts that I reviewed their terms and conditions are prohibited. Along with Spiders, Email campaign sites and a few other related items.
Finally
Best thing is to do your research. Understand the product you are working on or already have. Forecast everything! If your forecast says massive growth it may be better to invest more infront so you do not have to make a large change later. It will prevent down times and so much more.
