I have a confession to make. I have never hosted a website before. I’ve coded primarily on Tumblr and Codepen, which aren’t hosting sites. While I now know what hosting service I want to use for a website I had in mind, I was still curious about web hosting, how it works, and most importantly, the different types of web hosting. In this chapter, I’ll be sharing some of what I learned about the different types of web hosting.

Adam Michael Wood, writing for whoishostingthis.com, covers a lot of information about web hosting in his November 2020 post “What Is Web Hosting, Exactly? Everything You Need To Know.” In Chapter 2 of his post, Wood discusses five different types of web hosting. This chapter will focus on three types of hosting: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and Virtual Private Server hosting (VPS).

1. Shared Hosting

Woods writes that shared hosting is the most common form of web hosting and that it is the least expensive and least powerful. As you might have guessed from the name, in shared hosting, different web hosting customers “share the same computer”. This means that all of the different accounts and their websites are “stored in the same drive, processed by the same CPU, and delivered by the same web server.”

However, this also means all the websites of all the accounts are all using and competing for the same resources on the computer they share. This becomes a problem if there’s a website on the shared hosting server that needs a lot of resources or receives hundreds or thousands of visitors in a few minutes, which leads to things like performance lags and downtime for the other less popular sites on the shared server. The popular site won’t be immune from crashing either.

For this reason, I think shared hosting is best for small websites and small blogs.

2. Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting gives you complete control over an entire server where you are the only person on that server. As a result of this, dedicated hosting has many advantages such as allowing you to install almost any software you want to and better performance and speed. But as Wood points out, dedicated hosting is also more expensive in terms of time and money and more complicated.

Since you are the only one on your server, you also become the person who is responsible for running it. You become responsible for tasks such as debugging problems or conflicts, making sure all your software is up to date, ironing out any problems with the server, etc. All of these tasks take time and aren’t simply tasks you do once and then don’t have to deal with again.

While dedicated hosting is powerful, I think it also seems too complicated and time intensive for most people.

3. Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS)

Woods describes VPS hosting as falling somewhere between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. He writes that with VPS hosting, “you have your own dedicated server, but the server is a virtual machine, not a physical one.”

VPS hosting gives you control over the hosting environment like a dedicated server does and generally gives you a bigger chunk of the “overall computing power” and bandwidth. This is because even though the virtual machines that act as servers all share server resources, you’re usually not competing with as many other people and websites on a VPS server. The fact that the server is a “virtual machine” also gives you a layer of protection from problems on other sites.

I think that VPS hosting would be best for online businesses or mid-size companies or organizations.

Note: This chapter is a revised version of a blog post titled “A Brief Overview of 3 Hosting Types” on Digital Media Miscellany.