Hosting is a key considering to make for website owners, and it becomes more crucial if you own a business website. Many of the service takers tend to look at the cost of hosting only and overlook many critical areas which adversely affect the performance of the website. You need to remember that fact a wrong choice made in terms of hosting can have many adverse impacts on your website including, but not limited to:

• Slow site loading speed
• Security threats.
• Data loss
• Compromised SEO
• Increased downtime
• Loss of business etc.

The choice of web hosting needs to be done based on the exact need in hand, in light of the future requirements and growth plans of the organization. This is the reason why there are different types of customized hosting solutions available out there. You can find an apt solution to effectively cater to the hosting needs of various types of business websites. Even when various hosting services appear to be similar as a whole, each option has its own pros and cons.

Considerations to make while adopting hosting service

Choosing an ideal hosting service may be primarily done based on the following requirements are:

• Your budget
• Size of your website and expected initial traffic.
• The expected spike in traffic over the next year.
• Need for technical support
• Security preferences
• Performance criterion etc.

Further, in this article, we will try to have an overview of three major hosting approaches as shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting.

Shared Hosting

This is the most economical solution in web hosting, which is suitable for individual website owners, bloggers, and small business websites with minimal traffic. In shared hosting, many websites are hosted on a single server by sharing its resources like disk space, bandwidth, and memory, etc. The providers offer a complete administration system, which is ideal for individuals who are not having any technical knowledge. The providers take care of security, updates, backups, maintenance, and software installation, etc. If your website has specific needs like as special modules, use of specific languages, or a unique database management need, then shared hosting is not ideal to choose.

Shared hosting benefits

• Cost: The major reason why small businesses and individual site owners get attracted to shared hosting is its affordable cost. Providers also put forth different options and attractive pricing if you opt for shared hosting solutions.
  
• Ease of use: When you look for the best website hosting providers as a simple and flexible solution while launching a website which can easily adapt to your basic needs, shared hosting is the most effective solution. The choices may be largely limited as the typical offers in shares hosting are well defined.
• Performance: The performance of your shared hosted website will fully depend on the performance of the hosting server. Apart from a few slowdowns at some exceptional cases, shared servers offer good performance.

Dedicated Hosting

An entire server belongs to you in dedicated hosting. This hosting approach is ideal for the websites expecting a lot of traffic and also requires many dedicated resources for site operation like e-commerce, the marketplace, social networking, mail clients, etc. Even though a dedicated server cannot ensure 100% performance or security, it remains the ideal choice for those who are keen about these aspects when compared to shared hosting. You don’t have to share bandwidth or space with any others, which ensures faster loading and speedy performance. However, it is more expensive than other modes of hosting.

Benefits of dedicated hosting

• Autonomy in website administration: In terms of administration, dedicated servers give you autonomy. You are free to install your own apps and services and have access to the server to custom configure it in the way you wish to.
• Optimum performance: Clients of shared hosting is largely dependent on traffic and the activities. This is not so in the dedicated servers. There are some resources, and your hosting is isolated from other servers.
• More security: It offers optimum security benefits compared to shared hosting. Your database and file systems remain private and fully secured. It is inaccessible to any other clients.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is similar to VPS hosting. The primary difference is that VPS hosting is made on a physical server and on the other hand, cloud hosting is on various virtual servers between multiple server computers working together like a cloud. Cloud hosting is accessible to all types of websites of all sizes.

VPS hosting has many limitations in terms of data transfer and bandwidth etc., but cloud hosting can tap into the resources again. Moreover, cloud hosting is more reliable also in terms of uptime as if one server fails; your website will not be down as it will automatically use the resources of another server. Many big companies like Amazon and Google also host on cloud systems lately as there are significant advantages to it.

Advantages of cloud hosting

• Availability of on-demand resource: Availing cloud services, you can request for any services on the go and also just need to pay based on the services availed.
• Better availability: Compared to on-premises servers or even dedicated hosting services, virtual machines have the ability to transfer data between machines in the loop, so there is no downtime in the event of any server failure. Cloud services have the most reliable stability in the web hosting field.
• More scalability: There are more resources available on cloud hosting and faster access is also possible, so cloud hosting ensures optimum scalability. This is the reason why many small businesses use cloud services, with which they can avail the most needed services at limited cost initially and then later scale up to a better package and avail more services.

Cloud hosting is found to be an ideal choice for medium to high traffic. As the performance of any website largely depends on the server resources, a sudden increase in the traffic volume due to seasonal hype or a viral campaign on social media may cause issues in effectively handling it. Cloud hosting can handle such situations also well while other modes of hosting may fail.

As you have seen above, there are multiple options while thinking of availing a good hosting service for your business website. Each of these has benefits and drawbacks, which needed to be weighed in light of your requirements, budget, and future needs to choose an apt service.