These days, a business without a website is like a kite without a string, and as more and more business owners go online, I thought it might be a good time to talk about the basics of web hosting.  After all, there are a lot of choices out there when it comes to hosting your website, but it’s critical that you select the right host for you—otherwise, your website won’t be as profitable as it could be.

Here’s a basic explanation of the web hosting choices that you have, along with the pros and cons of each one.

Shared Hosting

This is the most basic of web hosting plans, and the least expensive to operate.  You won’t pay more than about $15 a month for the service, and you could pay a lot less than that.  With this type of plan, you share a space with many other websites.  Of course, you get what you pay for, and with this type of plan, you’ll be limited in how many visitors can efficiently access your site, and if you need to make additions to your site, you will be limited in what you can do.  You won’t be able to use streaming audio or video with this type of hosting because there simply won’t be enough bandwidth.

Virtual Private Server

For more money—about $50-$150 a month—you can set up your site on a virtual private server.  This will allow you more flexibility than shared hosting when you need to add pages to your site or when you need faster speed.  You’ll still be limited to the amount of space you have, but for many businesses, the assigned space in this type of arrangement will be sufficient.  If you do a good amount of credit card transactions on your site, you’ll definitely want to up upgrade from shared hosting so your visitors won’t have to deal with slow loading pages.

Dedicated Hosting

If you need a super fast website with unlimited expansion capabilities, then you might think about using dedicated hosting.  Rather than sharing space and “living” at the web host’s site, your site would reside at your own computer.  It’s much more expensive to do business this way—about $200 a month—but if you experience high visitor volume and transactions, you’ll likely end up frustrating customers and losing business if you don’t.

It’s not difficult to determine what type of hosting arrangement would best suit your business.  Simply determine what needs you’ll have, and then plan for a little more so you can grow into your site, rather than outgrowing it.

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