A web server is a critical element when you want to create a website for your company or for your personal use. It is the web server itself that will serve the page to a visitor, and thereby help in displaying your site. If you want a responsive site that does not take too long to display, you need a good web server. Therefore, the importance of good web server in your website design cannot be overstated.
When you want to rent space on a web server so that you can host your site on it, you have the option to go with a shared hosting plan, or with a dedicated hosting plan. In the following sections we will discuss the former at length, and find out when you may need it.
What is Shared Hosting
In shared web hosting, your website is hosted on a single machine that is also used to host other sites. This is where the word share in its name comes from — you share the access to the server with other clients and their sites. The other sites are not visible to you, so you can control your account as if yours is the only site hosted on the server.
The other type of plan is when you hire a dedicated server for your site, and is therefore called a dedicated hosting plan. In dedicated plans, you have the control of a complete server, along with the type of software that runs on it. In such cases, you can install your choice of operating system on the server, and control it to every extent possible.
In cased of shared webhosting, you can use software such as cPanel to control and manage your websites on a given server. cPanel is one of the popular choices, another software that does similar work is DirectAction and Plesk. Plans that offer the CPanel are called cPanel hosting plans. However, it should be noted that cPanel is a very popular software, so almost every shared web plan comes with cPanel hosting. If you need any other type of software on your machine, it is better to confirm that the service provider has that software before you get an account with them.
What type of Hosting do you Need
You should apply for a shared webhosting account if your requirements are for a small site that does not get much traffic, or if you do not want to spend much on your hosting costs. Average dedicated plans cost up to five to ten times the cost of a shared plan, and therefore should only be considered when you have the budget or the requirement for them.
The advantage of shared plans is that they are cheaper, but the disadvantage is that they are not very extensible. If your site becomes popular suddenly, and sees a spurt in traffic, it may not be able to sustain the extra load in bandwidth or processing. This is clearly explainable by the fact that it is costler to rent a complete machine, than to rent shared access to it. Therefore, if you want to be able to have more control over the responsiveness and quality of your site, you should apply for dedicated plans.
Normally, the plans advertised by webhosting companies refer to their shared plans. For example, if you see that a company is advertising its plan for $4.99 per month, it is likely that it is talking about its shared plans.
If you are a beginner at making websites, and do not want to spend too much money on this exercise you should consider shared types of plans. However, if you want to make a business website that should cater to the customers and make a good impression even when it has a lot of load on it, then you should go for dedicated web plans. With the use of software such as Plesk and cPanel, the former type of plans are quite easy to manage, especially when compared to dedicated type of plans. Using cPanel and software like it, you can install new Content Management Software at the click of a button, telling us that they are definitely the best option for you if you are just starting out.