What is Web Hosting?
Web Hosting is the process by which a website gets a home on the Internet. Think of midPhase as being a landlord and the apartments we rent out the space where websites live. We provide space on our servers and access to our network for thousands of web sites. So what is web hosting? Well, web hosting in itself is neither remarkable nor groundbreaking, it's been around for a long time and the basic nature of it hasn't changed in all that time. It's just gotten more complicated, feature-rich and adaptive over the years.
Types of Hosting
Web hosting can be broken down into three categories, with sub-categories therein. What is web hosting? Read on and discover!
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common kind. Customers are assigned to a specific server and reside there, side-by-side for the Internet to access. It's much like a big ol' apartment building in a lot of respects with good neighbors and bad neighbors, space crunches and bad parking. If one site is getting hammered it affects the other sites residing on that server, sometimes making them sluggish or even inaccessible. Getting more space, too, is very tough. Much like adding a room onto your apartment you'd be hard pressed to get it done. Your only option more times than not is getting a larger apartment or moving into a house of your own. More on that later. Most of the time shared hosting works just fine for sites that don't get a large amount of traffic or require a lot of space. The majority of our 85,000 plus customers are shared hosting so it speaks volumes as to how popular and reliable shared hosting can be. It's when a site outgrows shared hosting that the following two options are needed.
VPS
VPS, or virtual private servers are a step up from shared hosting giving the customer the ability to host more heavily trafficked and resource intensive sites as well as having more control over the nitty-gritty details of your hosting environment. 30 VPS accounts typically share a server's processor and memory, a noticeable improvement over what shared hosting offers. It's for that reason VPS customers typically pay anywhere from three to ten times as much as shared hosting customers. The stability and reliability a VPS offers is worth it for small businesses and others with needs that exceed normal shared hosting. Think of VPS as a condominium as compared to the apartments of shared hosting. You have more control over what goes on in their unit and typically have less and higher quality neighbors. But for VPS customers who need even more space and power than what is provided there are dedicated servers.
Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers are the top of the line for web hosting. A dedicated server customer pays a lot more per month, starting around $100 and for that money gets an entire server to yourself. The entirety of the processor and memory belong to you to do with what you want. You have no neighbors, no landlord and no one to tell you what you can or cannot do outside of what US and Illinois State law permits. Dedicated servers are also the height of scalability with extra hard drives, more memory and faster network cards among the myriad of add-ons and upgrades available. Dedicated is just like having a house, a marked improvement over shared hosting and a must for any business that requires beaucoup power and features to give you true 100% uptime and accessibility. midPhase offers dedicated servers of all sizes to accommodate the needs of our customers big and small.
