Hosting Options

So what are your hosting options?

Once you’ve made the decision to create an on-line presence for yourself or your business and have a website built, you’ll need a place to store the collection of files that make a website function and a way to make those files accessible to other people connected to the internet. A web server, through web hosting, provides these critical functions.

Whilst every website needs hosting, there are a number of ways that website hosting can be done. The type of hosting you need will depend on your websites size and complexity, as well as the resources and technical expertise you have at your disposal.

Shared hosting is the hosting of multiple websites on the same web server and is by far, the most commonly used hosting service. With shared hosting, a web hosting company allocates the user storage space and makes the website’s files accessible to other users through the internet. The web host also maintains the server and provides technical support for it. For those who are not technically minded or have access to their own technical support staff, having a web host to manage this is a very good option.

One of the major advantages of shared hosting is that it costs much less than most other types of website hosting due to the efficient use of the servers resources. The web hosting company has the experience and resources to provide first class reliability and technical support for your website ensuring that your site is kept running at all times and serving quickly.

Shared hosting is perhaps most suited for individuals and small to medium sized business websites.

Dedicated Web Hosting is a web server devoted solely to your own website. You can purchase your own server or pay for access to a server owned by someone else. In any type of dedicated hosting, whether on your own site or elsewhere on someone else’s facility, you will have full control over it’s use and administration. This allows you to control all aspects of your website. If the website to be hosted is a for a company with plenty of technical and financial resources, dedicated hosting may be the right type of hosting for you. If your site has many many pages demanding a lot of server space and bandwidth, then a dedicated web host may be a pre-requisite. For individuals and small to medium companies however, there are a number of aspects of dedicated hosting that make it a less desirable option. Setting up or leasing and maintaining your own server requires a significant financial investment and a great deal of technical expertise. You will need to ensure that the server you use is stable, reliable, well maintained and able to handle large traffic to ensure that your website is reliably on-line and available to visitors using the internet at all times – maintaining this level of performance is not always easy!
Virtual Private Server (or VPS for short) Website Hosting is basically a cross between dedicated hosting and shared hosting. VPS hosting consists of a dedicated server being shared by multiple users. The users share the resources of the server, but the server space is strictly divided into allocated percentages so that each users percentage is dedicated to that user’s website. This type of hosting gives a user some of the control of a dedicated server without the large-scale investment in a server that may have more space than is necessary. There can be a drawback to this type of hosting option as service providers often have somewhat confusing service agreements that include unbeknown limitations for their users.

Here at thesmarthand.co.uk we don’t offer directly supplied Web Hosting services and openly encourage our clients to ‘take ownership’ of their own hosting accounts. We are however, always happy to discuss these options with you and help you make an informed decision based on the type of website you require.