You have gathered all the necessary contents to put on your website. The task of designing the webpages is already finished as well. Finally, you found the perfect partner in running a website - a web host that guarantees reliability, stability, and full-featured hosting service at a very reasonable price. Does it all end there? Of course not; there is a bigger task waiting for you after finding a good web host and that is choosing the right hosting type.

Don't make the mistake of subscribing to the wrong hosting type; otherwise you will lose either opportunities or money. Before you sign up, you should know what purpose a specific hosting type serves first. Below is the list of the different types of hosting together with their inherent strengths and weaknesses:

1. Free hosting

If you do not mind having a small amount of disk space, limited web features, and advertisements on your pages, then free hosting is for you. A free hosting account is usually equipped with features that are not only few but also unreliable. Likewise, there is no live support available in case of service interruptions. Free hosting, therefore, is not a recommended hosting type for big websites that receive high web traffic. However, it is still useful because it helps students and people who can't afford paid hosting to acquire a small space on the web. In free hosting, a subscriber is only given a subdomain (i.e. subdomain.domain.com).

2. Shared Hosting

This type of hosting is most preferred by the majority of website owners today. Webmasters who don't have enough financial resources to pay for a dedicated server turn to shared hosting. This is because shared hosting is cheaper and doesn't have the disadvantages found in free hosting. In shared hosting, technical support is provided. This type of hosting is recommended to owners of personal websites and small business sites.

In shared hosting, you do not have full control over the server. For this reason, your site's performance may be adversely affected if your co-users are exceeding their disk space and bandwidth limits.

3. Dedicated Hosting

If you are willing to shell out more money because you don't want to be robbed out of disk space and bandwidth by other users, then opt for a dedicated hosting. In dedicated hosting, you have better control over your server because you're the only one who uses the whole system. A dedicated server can handle overwhelming web traffic and file requests. There are two kinds of dedicated hosting: managed and unmanaged. Managed dedicated hosting is when your server is maintained and monitored by a skilled web administrator. Meanwhile unmanaged dedicated hosting is when the server is maintained by you.

4. Colocation

If you choose to buy your own powerful server, you may do so. However, you will have to put it in a place where there is enough facilities to run it. Colocation is the type of hosting where you decided to install your own server in a data center owned by telecommunication company. This type of hosting can be very expensive so its only recommended if you are planning to build a really big, complex, and profitable website.

About the Author

Max Adams is the owner of Web Hosting Daily (http://webhosting.infospotters.com/). Our duty is to find you a web host that offers maximum security, reliability, and stability at a price that will surely fit your budget.