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Wanneer het gaat over het hosten van jouw website op het Internet, zijn er verschillende mogelijkheden en verschillende prijzen, elk met zijn eigen voor- en nadelen. Voor welke oplossing moet je nu uiteindelijk kiezen? Het hangt allemaal af van je budget en de mate van controle dat je zelf wenst te behouden. Hier volgt een overzicht van de verschillende mogelijke hosting oplossingen (Engels) :

- Colocation : A Location For Your Server

- Dedicated Hosting : Lower Front Costs

- Managed Hosting : Best of Both Worlds

- Shared Hosting : The Most Popular Option

- Business Application Hosting

- Clustered Hosting

- Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

- Reseller Hosting

- Free Hosting

Colocation – A location for your server

With colocation, you own and are responsible for your server or servers. However, you rent space at a hosting facility or datacenter that provides an environment that is conducive to the optimal working of your machines. Among the pros of this hosting option are:the temperature and humidity are controlled with HVAC system

- your server is protected from fires and other natural disaster

- depending on the company, your data may be backed up with recovery measures in place to tide over an emergency situation

- your server is protected from unauthorized access

- you have redundant connections to a reliable Internet backbone so that your site has the maximum uptime

- if your office moves, you do not have to move your server location

- your server is kept running with adequate power backup sources.

Colocation is the best option if your business is not large enough to have it’s own hosting area with all the costs of security, climate-control, backup sources and I.T. personnel you would need if you housed your own server infrastructure.

Colocation is a great option for medium-sized companies – your servers are protected by another company, while you still own and are responsible for all the software and the hardware. If you have sensitive data, need the best in security options, and want the best and most reliable Internet connections around, but without the cost of the security and the housing, then colocation is your best bet.

Dedicated Hosting – Lower Up-Front Costs

With colocation, you own the server and lease the physical location. With dedicated, you lease both the server and the space. Dedicated and colocation offer all the same benefits as those listed above. With a dedicated server (colocated servers are also dedicated), you don’t share a server or bandwidth with anyone else.

When it comes to cost, dedicated servers are less expensive than their colocated counterparts in the short run because you don’t have to spend a large amount initially to buy the hardware. The drawback is that if you wish to upgrade or change servers, you have to wait for the host to do this for you. With colocated, you simply buy the new hardware, enter the site and install it yourself.

Managed Hosting – Best of Both Worlds

Managed hosting is the most expensive hosting option – the flip-side is that you do not need the expense of having an I.T. member configuring and maintaining your server. Colocation and dedicated services typically have a managed option, which is what this type is. The hosting company is entirely responsible for the management and configuration of your server. Managed hosting offers all the benefits of dedicated hosting and colocation, along with the following (these may vary depending on the service plan):

- the provider takes care of all software updates, security patches

- technical support is included

- software installation, configuration and ongoing maintenance

You will have to look at the costs versus benefits to see which is better for you. If you have a strong IT team and you are geographically close to your facility, you may be better off managing your server yourself.

Shared Hosting – The Most Popular Option

By far the most popular option is shared hosting. You are one among many others who rent space on a single server and pay for the bandwidth you use. The greatest (and perhaps only) advantage of shared hosting is that it costs a fraction of what dedicated hosting or colocation would. Among the disadvantages:

- you have limited storage space and bandwidth

- some companies “oversell” their bandwidth and server space as a marketing tactic, promising huge or even “unlimited” amounts of resources with the knowledge that most of their customers will only use a fraction of what they are allowed. This often leads to overcrowding and very slow response times.

- you don’t know who you share space with – the server your website resides on may get blacklisted if your co-sharers turn out to be involved in illegal activities

- you may face site outages if your co-sharers are bandwidth hogs.

To avoid many of these negatives, research the best shared hosting options from reliable companies, and look at their feedback from unbiased sites, like webhostingtalk.com.

Business Application Hosting

A fancy marketing term for shared hosting. The big difference is that these hosting companies do not play the “oversell” game, instead offering more reasonable bandwidth and hard drive space amounts. You get less space for a higher price, but with the knowledge that your server will not be crammed with many other websites. This is a great option if you are concerned more about reliability and strong servers than price – and of course, if you run a business, reliability should always be of greater importance than price!

Clustered Hosting

A method whereby multiple hosting servers are connected together and sharing all content. This allows greater flexibility and balance in space and bandwidth usage, and is designed for larger, more popular websites.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

The answer to those looking for middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting. While the server is actually shared between many sites, special software actually partitions the machine into completely separate systems. For all practical purposes, you are getting a dedicated machine.

You get a fixed amount of bandwidth and storage space, your own IP address, and your own database space. The only downside here is that the space is limited. So if your needs grow beyond this limit, it’s probably time to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Reseller hosting

This is shared hosting in a new bottle – a hosting company leases out server space to a reseller, and the reseller in turn repackages and offers shared hosting under his or her own name. The advantages and disadvantages of shared hosting hold good here, with one additional disadvantage – even if you can trust your immediate reseller, you don’t know who they depend on for your connection to the Internet backbone. And if the original seller is not reliable, you’re in for a rough ride.

Free hosting

Sites like WordPress, Geocities and Blogger allow you a minimum amount of space where you can host your own sites. This is enough for your needs if you’re a blogger or just looking to put up a site for your own personal use. On the plus side, it’s free, and on the minus, you have absolutely no control over your hosting or any server configurations, and your site may have ads, banners and pop-ups from the sponsors to help keep your site free.

Hosting Features

Now that you know the different types of hosting, it is time to learn the features and differences between the various options:

Hosting Costs

Managed hosting is the costliest among all hosting options while free hosting, as the name implies, is free. When you opt for managed hosting, your cost includes that of the lease (either the data center, server, or both), infrastructure, bandwidth, management and administration, security and backup, and other miscellaneous expenses. This leaves you free from hiring a network administrator, so managed hosting is definitely an option for many smaller companies.

With colocation, you incur the cost of the server, of maintaining your hardware and software, and other running costs. With shared, virtual private and reseller hosting, you only pay your service provider for the use of their server, tech support and for other services included in your package.

Bandwidth

Colocation and dedicated servers allow you the maximum bandwidth while free hosting services allow you the least. Virtual private servers and business hosting provide limited but guaranteed bandwidth, something you cannot expect with a shared server where you share space and bandwidth with many other customers. Clustered hosting avoids bandwidth bottlenecks, allowing greater reliability and speed.

Control

Though managed colocated services and dedicated servers are some of the costliest options, you have the advantage of retaining the most control over the hardware and software on your server. Rather than having to choose one of the options provided by your service provider in shared hosting, you get to choose the operating system, any software and hardware for your server.

Maintenance Plans

Unmanaged servers are the most difficult to maintain and update, because you are responsible for the hardware and software. You must keep up to date with patches and system updates to ensure that you’re not beset by viruses and other malware. Because of this, you will likely have an I.T. team within your company that supports this. If you are a small company with a limited I.T. budget, or you just have a personal site, quality shared hosting is your best option.