Shared hosting is what most people use to host their website. This is the cheapest form of web hosting available and will suit the needs of most webmasters.
Shared hosting is pretty cheap, with some plans starting at only $5 per month. The price of the plan you choose will be dependant on how much space and bandwidth you will need. If you are willing to pay enough, you can get a shared hosting account that has unlimited space and bandwidth!
The one major downfall for shared hosting is that since you are sharing a web server with many other websites, your site may load slower when there is a lot of server usage from other sites.
VPS Hosting
The next step up from shared hosting is VPS hosting. This is actually a hybrid mix of a shared server and a dedicated server. A VPS partitions space on the server and allows multiple dedicated servers to run on one machine. This gives you control over most of the settings on your server, but it does not cost as much as a dedicated server.
Dedicated Server
This is top of the line web hosting. This means that you are given access to your own server and can do almost anything you want with it. You don’t share it with anyone and you can control most of the settings.
This is a great solution if you have one very large and busy website, or multiple smaller websites. The main downfall to this solution, though, is the price. Dedicated servers can easily cost over $100 per month.
If you run a smaller website, you don’t need to spend your money on a dedicated server.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting has pretty much one use. Reseller hosting allows you to partition of the space and bandwidth assigned to you, so you can package your resources and resell them to others.
| Shared Hosting | Virtual Private Server | Dedicated Hosting | Reseller Hosting | |
| Details | Shared hosting means that there are many different websites all residing on one server. They share the servers resources. | VPS servers are made by partitioning a dedicated server. Each partition can run as its own individual server. | Dedicated hosting gives you the use of a whole server. It is not shared by anyone. | Reseller hosting allows the administrator to partition his resources to allow clients to have their own hosting account. |
| Advantages | -Lower Cost -Easy to set up | - More customization available - Mid range price | - Usually the fastest servers - Complete control over all aspects of the server | - Very easy for you to partition accounts for sale |
| Disadvantages | - Not much flexibility, can be slower than other hosting options | - A little more expensive than shared hosting | - Higher costs - More work to maintain | - Higher cost - Might not be as fast as a dedicated server - More maintenance needed |
| This type of Hosting is for you if… | This plan is great for people running smaller websites and that don’t need total control of everything. | This plan is great for people who want to have a dedicated hosting plan, but don’t want to spend a lot of money | This plan is great for people who run large and popular websites. People who have a lot of technical know-how usually use dedicated web hosting. | This plan is great if you want to resell hosting to other people. It is also great if you want to run a large number of websites by yourself. |
| Our recommendation | HostMonster | LunarPages | StartLogic | HostGator |
