Geekflare’s Hosting Guides

Hosting is an online service that allows businesses and individuals to rent infrastructure assets like web servers, database servers, storage, firewalls, and networking. You can leverage a hosting platform to host your website, business applications, data, and more.

Choosing the right hosting service is important to ensure your online business is available all the time, protect it from online threats like DDoS attacks and malware, and load your website faster by providing optimal server resources.

There are many different types of hosting available, such as:

• Shared Hosting: Ideal for individuals and micro businesses with low-traffic websites like blogs and personal portfolios.
• VPS Hosting: A great pick for websites with medium-level traffic, offering a balance of affordability and performance with the option to scale resources when needed.
• Managed WordPress Hosting: Best suited for WordPress sites and busy site owners who want to focus on growing their business rather than focusing on hosting technicalities.
• Dedicated Hosting: Best for large-scale applications, high-traffic websites, resource-intensive tasks, or critical services with regulatory and technical compliance needs.
• Cloud Hosting: Ideal for anyone looking for stable and reliable hosting with high scalability and a pay-as-you-go model, especially for sites with fluctuating or high traffic requirements, such as eCommerce.
• Colocation Hosting: Ideal for big businesses with a need to own infrastructure and control, especially when there are compliance and security requirements. It removes the need to own physical space while retaining infrastructure ownership.
• Reseller Hosting: Best for entrepreneurs, designers, agencies, and developers for providing cost-effective hosting to their clients.

Geekflare has a team of hosting experts working in the IT infrastructure and hosting industry for more than two decade. We provide unbiased recommendations. To do so, we evaluate hosting platforms by looking at criteria such as ease of use, pricing, uptime, performance, security, customer support, and online reputation.

Exploring Different Hosting Types

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting uses a virtually isolated environment to offer hosting services to its customers.  Here, web/cloud hosting providers use virtualization technology (such as hypervisor virtual layer) to divide a physical server into isolated independent environments, ensuring dedicated resources to each participant. 

Technically, VPS servers share resources among other users, but make sure that your resources are guaranteed via proper allocation, configuration and execution.

This approach brings top-notch performance (similar to dedicated servers) at a fraction of its costs. It also removes shared hosting limitations with improved uptimes, scalability and security.

The benefits of VPS hosting include:

• Isolation: Provides a higher level of isolation compared to shared hosting with access to dedicated resources such as CPU, RAM, and disk space.
• Scalability: Easily scale resources when needed.
• Customization: Install your choice of operating system and software and configure them as per your requirements.
• Security: Offers top-notch security compared to shared hosting through proper isolation technology, security software, and a firewall.
• Performance: Capable of handling higher traffic loads and processing requests. 
• Root access: Get root access to VPS with the ability to configure the server and install the software.
• Reliability: Guarantees higher uptime with measures to minimize downtime.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting gives businesses access to the entire physical server to run their website/application or service.  The idea behind dedicated hosting is simple: a single server owned by a single owner or company. Thus, the owner gets access to all its resources, which is ideal for high-traffic sites such as eCommerce or enterprise applications that need to meet regulatory and technical requirements. 

Its biggest advantage is performance and complete control, but comes at substantial cost. There are different types of dedicated hosting including managed, unmanaged and semi-managed dedicated hosting.

The benefits of dedicated hosting include:

• Unmatched performance: Access to dedicated resources means top-notch performance that is capable of handling high traffic and spikes.
• Full control and customization: Dedicated hosting gives full control over the server with the ability to customize it as per specific needs.
• Bullet-proof security: Allows for best security with the option to implement custom security solutions such as IDS (intrusion detection systems).
• Reliability: As no resources are shared, there is no impact on performance and downtime, offering higher reliability compared to shared and virtual hosting.
• Compliance: Dedicated hosting providers provide a wide range of compliance services, including PCI DSS for eCommerce and HIPAA for healthcare.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting provides a flexible and scalable hosting environment. It takes advantage of its multiple servers fleet, giving businesses the ability to serve a worldwide audience through its global infrastructure. 

Most cloud hosting providers like GCP, AWS, Azure follow a pay-as-you-go model, making them affordable and protecting businesses from overprovisioning or underprovisioning resources. 

There are primarly three types of cloud hosting models:

• Public: In the public cloud, the resources such as storage, compute or networking are offered via the internet. 
• Private: Private cloud is built, run and managed by a private entity. These are on-premise solutions and provide better security, control and customization.
• Hybrid: In hybrid cloud setup, an organization takes advantage of both private and public cloud. They host one private computing environment for better security and performance, while taking advantage of public cloud scalability and reach.

Benefits of cloud hosting include:

• Scalability: Offers an easy way to upgrade or downgrade resources.
• Great uptime and speed: Provides superior uptime with excellent speed using CDN. 
• User-friendly: Managed cloud hosting is user-friendly as most aspects, such as setup, configuration, maintenance, and upgrades, are handled by the hosting provider.
• Excellent security: Cloud hosting offers top-notch security with DDoS protection, firewalls, and backups for complete peace of mind.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting where you share resources with other hosting accounts on the provider’s server.  It keeps prices low, but can result in performance issues due to shared resources and non optimal configuration.

Benefits of shared hosting:

• Cost-effective: They offer the cheapest way to host websites online, as the server and maintenance costs are divided among multiple users.
• Easy to use: Most shared hosting offers an easy-to-use dashboard with options like website builders and email hosting.
• No technical expertise: Users don’t need any technical expertise to use shared hosting.

Hosting Type	Key Features	Pros	Cons
Shared hosting	– Multiple sites hosted on a single server with shared resources – Easy to use – Cost-effective	– Cost-effective- Easy to use – No technical expertise required	– No root access – Limited resources – Shared IP
VPS hosting	– Uses virtualization technology to create isolated hosting environments – Guaranteed resources – Top-notch performance	– Excellent reliability, uptime and scalability – Good customer support – Offers secure environment	– Expensive for businesses with limited budget – Unmanaged VPS require technical expertise to manage.
Dedicated hosting	– Access to entire physical server and its resources- Owned by a single entity – Offers wide range of compliance such as HIPAA or PCI DSS	– Unmatched performance – Full customization and control – Highly reliable	– High costs – Complex maintenance
Cloud hosting	– Flexible and scalable hosting environment – Access to global server fleet infrastructure – Ability to use public, private or hybrid cloud model	– Affordable – Pay-as-you-go model	– Limited control over underlying hardware  – Security and privacy can be a concern for enterprise players

Storage Hosting

Storage hosting provides value to businesses that deal with tons of data and need a service provider that can store, manage, and protect their data. 

For example, a business that delivers videos (such as YouTube) to consumers needs a reliable and fast storage hosting service.

Storage hosting offers different storage types, including:

• Object storage: Object storage is data storage that stores data in objects using a flat structure, accessible via a unique identifier. They offer benefits such as scalability, cost-effectiveness, easy-to-manage, and data resilience/availability.
• Block storage: In block storage, data is split into equal-sized blocks. This brings benefits such as fast access, flexible horizontal storage, and compatibility with different OS and systems. However, block storage does have some disadvantages, such as limited search, metadata, and expensive cost.
• File storage: In file storage, the data is stored in files. It follows a hierarchical storage methodology, where files are organized in folders under directories and subdirectories hierarchy. It uses standard file-level protocols such as Network File System (NFS), making them more accessible. However, it does come with some cons, including unstructured data, expensive scalability, and data accessibility issues.

Email Hosting

Email hosting provides businesses to manage and maintain email messages using dedicated servers. They handle email storing, sending and receiving with special features to ensure optimal email delivery.

Businesses need professional email hosting as they bring benefits such as:

• Customized business email addresses that build trust and professional image.
• Provides enhanced security and data protection against sophisticated cyber threats.
• Ensure high uptime for reliable email communication.
• Simplifies email management with user-friendly interfaces and the ability to organize and categorize emails easily.
• Offer spam filtering to stop malicious and spam emails.
• Provide complete peace of mind with regular automated email backups.

Game Hosting

Game hosting ensures dedicated resources for online games to run and provide a lag-free playing experience. These are mostly powerful hosting as games need fast hardware (such as NVMe SSD, newer DDR4/5 RAM and powerful processor) to run. It also requires high bandwidth to seamlessly transfer assets between players and the server.

Finding the Perfect Hosting for Your Needs

Before choosing the right hosting for your needs, you must consider the following factors:

• Budget: Depending on your budget, you might want to choose between Shared (cheapest), VPS, Cloud, or Dedicated hosting (costliest).
• Website traffic: Estimate website traffic and choose hosting based on it (shared for basic traffic, VPS- moderate and Cloud/dedicated for high-traffic websites).
• Technical expertise: Choose managed hosting if you don’t have technical expertise and want the provider to handle setup, configuration, and maintenance. If you are confident in technical expertise, go for unmanaged hosting.
• Specific requirements: Opt for specialized hosting such as eCommerce hosting for eCommerce sites, Forex VPS for forex trading, Managed WordPress hosting for WordPress, or dedicated/VPS hosting for custom security requirements.

We recommend to utilize Geekflare’s hosting reviews and comparison guide before making buying decision.