Choosing a Web Hosting: Between Budget and Features

There are so many web hosting providers out there (including green hosting) that offer various hosting plans at very affordable and competitive prices, from cheap hosting plans for personals to dedicated servers for growing and progress companies. To be able to meet every client’s needs, they are also flexible in customizing a hosting package designed for any business as well as provide advanced features as much as possible to ensure the clients get all the tools they need to develop and maintain websites easily. However it is important to know the differences, advantages and disadvantages of several hosting plans available for both personal and business purposes.

Budgeted Web Hosting
Just like the name implies, these hosting provides hosting packages to best meet your small budget, from 2$ to 10$ a month according to the features included and the length of subscriptions. It has pleased speed and service uptime, that suitable for personal and starter business. Furthermore, this web hosting has some essential features for running an online business, such as email auto responders, shared SSL (128bit Encryption) security, OS Commerce shopping cart, Open PGP/GPG Encryption, PayPal and merchant account support. However, this hosting plan is not recommended for any website that needs huge bandwidth and faster audio and video streaming.

Shared Business Web Hosting
This hosting plan starts from 10$ to 20$ a month. It offers greater bandwidth, service uptime and speed compared with the budgeted hosting can offer. This is reasonable because the business hosting has fewer amounts of maximum clients per server (20, 30 or 50 clients) than the budgeted hosting has (200, 300, 500 or more clients). In general, hosting companies that offer business web hosting come with better technical support and own its own servers to offer the availability of client’s website secured (while some cheap web hosting companies do not). However, because it is a shared web hosting, client is unable to do any custom application (both software & server environment).

Dedicated Server
Besides business hosting, a premium hosting company also offers dedicated server for any company that needs a powerful web hosting, greater bandwidth and disk space as well as freedom to do custom applications. However, this hosting plan is very expensive (no less than 200$ a month).

VPS Web Hosting
This is a solution for companies that need more features than a shared hosting can provide, but have not enough budgets to use a dedicated server. VPS hosting divide one server into several virtual machines, wherein each machine is able to run its own service and operating system. In this way, a client will have freedom to do custom applications, manage all software & environment server, access root level and other dedicated resources just like in a dedicated server. A small company can apply this hosting for only 50$ a month according to package specifications they select.