What Type of Hosting are available?
With more than 30,000 companies to choose from,
picking the right host isn't easy. To simplify issues, we've split
the market into three broad categories: DIY hosts for newbies,
high-volume providers that sell shared hosting accounts to thousands
of users, and high-end vendors of dedicated servers, which provide
nearly unlimited amounts of space, machines, bandwidth, and support
for large-scale Web operations.
Discount do-it-yourself hosts
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Millions of Netizens call sites such
as GeoCities or Homestead their home on the Net. And
why not? These hosting sites are both easy and
cheap--in fact, you can still get a free hosting
account on GeoCities if you don't mind an ad
flashing on your page. Ad-free sites start around $5
per month; they include 25MB to store files on your
site and 5GB of bandwidth per month but no e-mail;
as you pay more, you can add more goodies, including
basic e-commerce tools--perfect for selling homemade
goods, your collection of old baseball cards, or
other hobbyist endeavors. But their cookie-cutter
design templates and limited bandwidth and storage
offerings will leave serious users hungry for more.
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KEY FEATURES
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Monthly fee: $5 to $35 |
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Bandwidth: 5GB to 10GB per
month |
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Storage: 25MB to 300MB
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E-mail accounts: 0 to 10 |
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Other tools: An FTP (file
transfer protocol) site makes uploading
files easier and faster; the option to
receive payments via PayPal saves you fees
associated with credit card authorizations. |
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Best for: Very small online
shops and newbies who don't want to learn
HTML. |
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Shared hosting
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Want your fair share of the Web?
Vendors such as Affinity, CI Host, and Interland
would be happy to sell you a piece. The vast
majority of the world's Web sites employ a shared
hosting provider, where hundreds of individual
sites live on one enterprise-level machine. Here,
there is an equally vast range of offerings, from
packages with a hundred megabytes of bandwidth and a
handful of e-mail accounts to unlimited amounts of
everything. You may have to pay a start-up fee of
$25 or more for a shared host, and your tech-support
experience can vary wildly. The big shared hosts,
such as CI Host, also offer dedicated servers, so
you can move up the scale as your business grows. If
your bandwidth and storage needs are exploding but
you can't afford the expense or the maintenance of a
dedicated server, you can often opt for a virtual
private server, a storage- and bandwidth-rich
machine that only a handful of users share.
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KEY FEATURES
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Monthly fee: $10 to $300 |
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Bandwidth: 5GB to 100GB per
month |
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Storage: 50MB to 120GB |
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E-mail accounts: 5 to 100 |
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Other tools: E-commerce
suites, traffic analysis, marketing, design.
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Best for: Small businesses
that don't have a dedicated Web know-it-all
or an IT department; large businesses with
simple Web site needs.
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Dedicated hosting
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Dedicated hosting means just that:
the server is yours and yours alone. Providers such
as Rackspace, INetU, and Fry will lease you a
bare-bones Linux box for $200 to $500 per month. But
if you have a large or complex Web site, you'll
likely use multiple servers for Web pages, e-mail,
databases, and streaming media; monthly fees can hit
six figures on the high end. There are two types of
dedicated host: unmanaged (or self-managed), where
the host provides the equipment but you maintain it
and your site; and managed hosting, where the
provider also keeps your server online and
up-to-date with the latest security patches--usually
for more money. Many providers in this space also
sell colocation services where you bring the servers
and staff, while they provide a secure facility with
rack space, electricity, and all the bandwidth you
can eat. With managed hosting, you're really paying
for peace of mind: state-of-the-art security,
multiple redundant systems, load balancing for
spikes in traffic, tenacious backup, and 24/7 access
to a live human who can bring your site back when it
crashes at 3 a.m.
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KEY FEATURES
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Monthly fee: $200 to six
figures |
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Bandwidth: 15GB to all you
can eat per month |
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Storage: 40GB and up |
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E-mail accounts: Unlimited |
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Other tools: E-commerce,
traffic management, site monitoring,
site-design services, search tools,
firewall, intrusion detection, and just
about any other tool you can think of. |
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Best for: Large enterprises,
e-commerce sites, or Web-centric small to
medium-size businesses. |
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