Webhosting Packages 101

In my time as a Technical Support Representative there are few issues that I’ve encountered time and time again.

The one I intend to shine some much needed light on today is what kind of service you can expect from various levels of hosting. As well I have included various pictures to help illustrate my points.

Hopefully this will article will help remove any such confusion and make life simpler for everyone.

I am however confronted by the undeniable reality that the people who really need this information probably aren’t going to be smart enough to use the search box and end up finding this.

Oh well at least I’ve tried to help everyone be more well informed.

I’m going to start on the lowest level of hosting available.

Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is analogous to riding a bus, sometimes a very overcrowded bus. You pay for your spot and eventually you’ll get where you’re headed. Definitely slower and you don’t have a lot of room to move.

These packages can come in various shapes and sizes. Some allow you to create a site from the ground up, others only give you a WordPress Installation. Some packages will include things like dedicated IP addresses and SSL certificates, the options are very wide ranging.

The two most widely advertised specs on these packages are: Bandwidth and Disk space. While these are important to consider, they are not as important as you might think.

The places you’ll generally run into problems with this kind of hosting is when your account uses too much CPU or Memory on the server. The amount of usage is dependent on the company hosting the package. Some only allow 1% other allow as much as 15%. The exact amount is generally hidden in the company’s ToS (Terms of Service).

The bottom line is most of these packages are meant to host small sites, blogs that don’t get a lot of readership, Drupal and Joomla type sites are generally okay but yet again only with smaller amounts of usage.

Some other things to be aware of are things like: Mailling Limits. Many shared hosting packages have limits such as 200 messages per hour.

Another common question is about iNodes, I personally have not come across this limitation but have been asked about it. iNodes refer to the number of files you can store in your account, there may be unlimited disk space listed but the number of number of files you can have does have a limit.

The next step up is:

Semi-Dedicated

This would be similar situation to a van or maybe a four door sedan, there are fewer people so you’ll get where you’re going faster.

These packages are generally still setup just like shared hosting packages. But there are fewer accounts on the server. As a result you get access to more resources.

Dedicated Server

These types of accounts are like having your own car to get you around. There’s no waiting for stops in between, you go from point A to point B.

Just like your own car, the performance is dictated by how much you are willing to spend on it. If you buy a Ford Festiva and take it on the Autobahn you won’t be able to go as fast as a Ferrari with V12 tucked behind the passenger compartment.

Just like your own car though, you’re expected to keep up on the maintenance yourself or hire someone else to do it for you.

You’ll also be expected to take care of any configuration/customization within your server as well.

Virtual Private Server

These are a different beast that have begun showing up in recent years. The advantages of these packages are that they give you access to a dedicated amount of system resources such as CPU power and Memory. Generally far more than what any shared hosting account could hope to fork out.

Another advantage some of these types of packages offer is scalability, as well as fault tolerance, and some will allow you to load balance to different places in the world.

These right here are generally going to offer the most bang for your buck.

Now I’m going to switch gears and move to:

Stupid Questions Regarding Hosting

I bring this up because I feel these are intertwined.

“I want to host a social network like Facebook.” or “I want to host a video sharing site like YouTube.”

I lump these two together because they go along the same lines and it almost never fails, people who want to host sites like these are curious about a bottom of the barrel shared hosting account.

Hosting sites like Facebook and YouTube requires not just one server but hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands. An estimate at: Data Center Knowledge says 30,000 (that was in October of 2009).

“How much server do I need to host x?”

This is another dumb question because there are so many variables involved.

If you’re really serious about wanting to run a community site that will receive and handle large amounts of traffic, you’re going to need a systems engineer to figure this question out. Chances are you’re going to need to a team of people to handle this.

The Aftermath

When purchasing web hosting it’s important to keep in mind what kind of site you’ll be hosting.

As with everything else in life, you get what you pay for, keep that mind before jumping up and down on Customer Service when your site gets shut down because your account was creating a problem for the server.

I’d like to say I don’t want to discourage anyone from building their own website, but there are plenty of people out there who just shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet, let alone to own a computer. More than likely if you’re reading this then you’re smart enough to handle yourself.