Posts Tagged ‘vps hosting’

Ten or fifteen years ago, people might surf the Internet for an hour or so in search of a little information and entertainment.  Now, people live a good part of their lives there.  Businesses rise and fall, romances blossom and crumble, friendships are made and dreams are fulfilled, and people go to college and to work, all in that magical virtual world they access through their phones and computers.  As such, it’s critical that businesses, no matter how small, reach their customers on the Web and advertise there. And the best way to do that is through web hosting.  When you sign up with a web hosting service, you can publish a website available to the entire world on the World Wide Web.  In basic terms, you use space on the web that the hosting service either owns outright or leases.  On this space, you build the site on which you’ll upload your informational files.  Now, there are three main kinds of web hosting services: shared, virtual private serving, and dedicated hosting, and we’ll examine these presently.

Shared hosting simply means that you “share” your web space with a bunch of other people.  If you imagine your web page as your apartment, then the shared server is the apartment building.  You might have only a few “roommates” on your server, or you might live in a giant, sprawling apartment complex with thousands of others living in the same building as you.  You and the other tenants not only share the server, but you share an Internet Protocol address as well.  While there are many great things about shared serving, including the low price, keep in mind that response times can be slower and the server can occasionally crash, shutting down all the websites on it.

A virtual private server, or VPS, is one where a server is split, as though that one server were actually multiple servers.  Each of these partitioned pieces of the server actually employs its own operating system.  VPS costs more than shared hosting does (and its users are less prone to spam than those who sign up with a shared hosting program) but does not cost as much as a dedicated server.  Again using the metaphor of a place to live, a virtual server might be thought of as a condominium complex, where each individual condo is sold separately and functions as a separate unit, while all the condos are still part of one complex, a complex owned by the same people.  At ChimeHost, we specialize Xen VPS hosting, OpenVZ vps hosting and Windows VPS hosting.

Last, a dedicated hosting service is one where you’ll get your very own web server, a server you can control, configure and operate however you’d like, even though you most likely won’t own it.  You can have as many domains as you like, and response times are usually fast.  You can also use as much space and bandwidth as you like, and the IPU is all yours.  Naturally, dedicated servers are very expensive