DEDICATED HOSTING

Dedicated Hosting is a single specialized server dedicated to hosting your websites. The dedicated server is not shared by anyone else and you have full control of what you want to do with it. You have your choice of Linux or Windows and can customize the server to meet your needs. Dedicated servers are the most expensive hosting options, and are designed for websites that get a lot of hits, store a lot of data, and run software that uses a lot of memory. Most websites do not fall into this category and can be hosted using one of the cheaper options available.

PREMIUM HOSTING

Premium Hosting servers have many of the benefits of a dedicated server without the price tag. In short, this involves a dedicated server with a low maximum number of accounts. Each account has a maximum number of resources it can use, which is based on the package for the account. The higher the package, the more resources allocated to the account. For increased security, each account is isolated in its own container. This means that an account’s security can not affect another account, nor can the resource usage of an account affect another account or crash the server. Each account is screened for acceptance and the server’s resources are never maxed out. Currently, our servers are only running about 10% of their maximum capacity. Customers serious about their website and require priority support will want to choose a Premium Hosting plan over a Shared Hosting plan.

SHARED HOSTING

Shared hosting is the most popular option for hosting because of the price. By combining hundreds, or even thousands of websites onto one box, the cost per account is the lowest of all the hosting options but at a great cost to your business. Any one of these accounts can affect your website and it’s not uncommon to have performance issues, SEO problems, and even end up on blacklist for spam. One website can slow down every other website on the server or even crash the server resulting in downtime until the offending account is isolated and suspended. Your IP address is shared between all of these accounts and therefore your website reputation is only good as the worst ranked website, resulting in poor SEO. Most web host promise you “unlimited” resources, but in reality, the server has a maximum limit and it’s not uncommon for a shared server to be running at 80% utilization. Essentially, the host is selling you a slice of the server and all websites share all available resources. If you are a heavy user, your website may violate the Terms of Service and can be shut down without notice. FTP traffic and image hosting is heavily regulated and can easily result in account termination.

VPS HOSTING

Virtual Private Server hosting is a hybrid of dedicated and shared. You are still sharing a server with other customers but you are guaranteed resources. VPS hosting involves a physical box running a virtual server for each customer. On the virtual server, processing power, memory, storage, and bandwidth are all set to a fixed cap.* With a good host, these limits are kept below the servers maximum limits, however, it’s not uncommon to see providers overselling their servers. With VPS, you can request your own dedicated IP address so that other VPS customers on the same box can’t ruin your websites reputation. The biggest down side of VPS hosting is that the fixed caps start out pretty small, especially bandwidth. The prices usually start out around 3x more than Shared Hosting. Since VPS gives you a higher control of the back-end of the server, this also increases the difficulty of management and yields a much higher learning curve. VPS hosting is best suited for customers with a higher technical knowledge that can’t afford the price of a dedicated server but still want higher flexibility and increased resource allocation over a shared hosting plan.

* We have recently seen host that no longer dedicate processing power, but instead allow the VPS to use the full power of the server’s CPU. While this may sound great, it means that any one of the other VPS can use the full power of the CPU as well. With this method, it is possible for one VPS to slow down another VPS or crash the server.