Experts in Business

If you are in the market for choosing your web hosting, you will know that hosting providers offer a great variety of options. This is good from the point of view of choice of budgets, however, how reliable, fast and secure these options are is not always stated.

I have scored these options between 1 and 5, where 5 is the best in category:

Shared Web Hosting

Ideal for very light usage, non-business critical websites.

Many websites share the same web server application. This can be several thousand. Often the bandwidth is shared too, so your website’s performance is often affected by other website users.

• Reliability 1
• Speed 1
• Security 1

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Ideal for customers that are looking to host several non-business critical light-usage websites.

Several logical servers share the same physical server through partitioning/virtualisation software. The most popular virtualisation software for hosting is Parallel’s Containers, which shares common library files amongst all VPS’s running on the same host. Faults with VPS’s can affect other VPS’s. (don’t believe all the hype!).

• Reliability 2
• Speed 2
• Security 2

Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS)

Ideal for customers looking to host several business-critical light-medium usage websites.

A more robust virtualisation technology than Containers, VMware and Xen are popular choices. This type of virtualisation software runs the entire VDS operating system in a virtual machine, completely seperate form other VDSs. The memory and hard disk footprint is therefore larger, often leading to higher pricing than VPSs.

• Reliability 3
• Speed 3
• Security 3

Dedicated Server

Ideal for heavy usage websites or for multiple light-midweight websites.

The operating system is installed directly on the server. Usually full root access is provided to the customer. This is generally the most reliable, fastest and most secure option for hosting. Consequently, it’s also the most expensive.

• Reliability 4
• Speed 4
• Security 4