- I don't know about you
but I find web hosting sites incredibly confusing.
They've got these big menus with all these complicated terms
like shared web hosting, managed web hosting,
dedicated server hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting.
I mean, what's the difference?
In this video I'm gonna explain every type
of web hosting to help you make a purchase decision
and know what is best for you and why.
Let's start off with shared hosting.
This is your most basic, simple form
of web hosting and you'd see it at sites
like GoDaddy, bluehost and Hostinger.
Shared hosting is a great fit for anyone just starting out
or anyone with a low to medium traffic website.
It's simple, so you're not gonna have to worry
about maintaining a server or having
any sort of IT knowledge to get started.
So shared hosting is great for someone who
just needs their website to be live,
and they're not getting so much traffic
that it's gonna be overwhelming the server.
Shared hosting is essentially just
a folder on a web server, and a web host may have up
to thousands of these folders on a single server.
So in other words, you're sharing a web server
with hundreds, maybe even thousands of other websites.
This is great because it's affordable
and your web host is responsible for maintaining
the server but it's not great in the sense
that you're sharing a server with a bunch of people.
And if someone's website ever were to get compromised,
it could potentially affect
all the other websites on the server.
But hopefully your web host has proper security
in place so that this doesn't happen.
With shared hosting, you'll always have a control panel,
commonly something like cPanel, so you can upload
your website files and change common settings.
But other than that, your web host
is responsible for maintaining the web server
and it's not too much work on your end to maintain.
And speaking of maintenance,
now's a great time to talk about managed hosting.
When you're shopping for web hosting, you're gonna see
the term managed used in various different places.
And I wanna be clear upfront,
this is not a category or type of web hosting.
It's not like managed hosting is its own thing
and shared hosting is a different thing.
Managed is basically a feature of hosting.
So you could have managed shared web hosting
or managed a VPS hosting.
Managed basically means that your web host
is responsible for maintaining the server
and ensuring reliability and uptime.
Now, this is a little bit complicated
because it means different things to different web hosts.
Typically, managed hosting is gonna mean that your host
is responsible for keeping the server updated,
keeping it secure, and making sure that if anything were
to ever go wrong and your website goes down,
they're responsible for getting it back up
and getting things in working order.
But that doesn't mean that your website
is never gonna have any problems, like if
you're using WordPress and you have a WordPress plugin
that updates and breaks the entire website, well,
that's not really the web host's fault, and just
because you have managed hosting doesn't mean that
they're gonna just fix your website every time it breaks
and you're never gonna have any complications.
There are different levels of managed hosting.
So for example, if you've ever seen WordPress hosting
as an option on a host website and you're like,
what's the difference between that and shared hosting?
Typically WordPress hosting is managed
and the web host has a couple extra features in there,
like automatic WordPress plugin updates
and automatic backups and extra security features
to keep your WordPress site functioning.
So we have a bit of extra features there that we
wouldn't have in a regular, managed shared hosting plan.
Shared hosting is almost always gonna be some form
of managed hosting, and that's
because you're sharing a web server
with hundreds or even thousands of other websites.
So your web host has to be responsible
for maintaining the server
and making sure it stays up for everyone.
But with unmanaged hosting, you are solely responsible
for the updates, maintenance, and security of your server.
And trust me, unmanaged hosting is no fun.
I've had it before, I've had things go wrong
and it's just a headache trying to figure out
how to get the server working again.
One common example
of unmanaged web hosting would be a VPS server.
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, and it's exactly
what the name describes, an entire virtual server
to yourself that typically runs Linux or Windows.
A VPS is great for hosting multiple websites
because you get the value of only paying one server bill
and you can host an infinite number of websites on a VPS.
Remember, this is a virtual computer
that you have full control over.
So whether you put five websites on it
or 500 websites, that's your decision.
But do keep in mind that you can overwhelm a VPS server
if you put too many websites on it.
So you're gonna have to decide how many sites
and how much traffic it can handle for the given specs.
The possibilities with a VPS are endless.
You could host a single website that you configure manually
or you could run a control panel like Plesk
or cPanel to easily run multiple websites.
You could even resell web hosting using cPanel on a VPS.
There's so much that you can do.
If you need more power and dedicated resources,
that's where a dedicated server comes in.
A dedicated server is basically the same as a VPS,
only it's a physical server where
the entire thing belongs to you.
So a VPS is actually run on a dedicated server
and you could have multiple VPSs hosted
on that dedicated server.
With a dedicated server,
you have the entire thing to yourself.
All of the ram, all of the CPU power, all of the disk space,
it all is available for you to utilize.
A dedicated server is arguably less flexible
than a VPS because it's a lot more difficult
to upgrade the RAM or the CPU.
In most cases, if you outgrow a dedicated server,
you either rent a second one or you upgrade
and move all your files over to one that's more powerful,
where with a VPS, you can just scale up
and add more RAM or add more storage at any time.
But a dedicated server has the advantage
of being completely isolated, while shared hosting,
VPS hosting, and even cloud hosting,
which we'll talk about later,
other people's files are always gonna be
on the same server as yours, but with a dedicated server
there is complete hardware isolation,
ensuring that only your files are ever
gonna run through that piece of hardware.
Dedicated servers are great for power users
who demand generous specs from their hosting.
Software startups or bigger companies
who can justify the cost and need the power.
And they're also great for hosting game servers.
It's a very common and popular use for dedicated servers.
If you need that isolation and you don't
want anyone else's files to ever be on
the same server as yours, a dedicated server is
for you but it's definitely not for beginners
and it's definitely not something you want to get
to tinker around unless you're an enthusiast.
And in that case, you probably
already know what a dedicated server is.
Next, I want to talk about cloud hosting
and I know what you're thinking.
Wait a minute, isn't any form of web hosting, cloud hosting?
Isn't cloud just another term for web server?
And you'd be correct.
So don't ask me why the entire web hosting industry decided
that this category of hosting is referred
to as cloud hosting, but that's the way it is.
And this term was really started by the AWS movement.
AWS or Amazon Web Services is an
enterprise cloud hosting platform used
by startups like Netflix, Twitter, and Adobe.
Amazon rethought the way that these software platforms
were hosted by introducing the concept of isolating
and compartmentalizing different aspects of the hosting.
Let's imagine for a second
that Twitter could be hosted on a dedicated server,
in reality, it would require hundreds or thousands
of dedicated servers with how popular Twitter is.
But let's just pretend for a second
that it could be hosted on one dedicated server.
We would begin to reach bottlenecks in different areas.
The dedicated server would need a ton of storage for all
of the profile pictures and photos that people post
to Twitter, but maybe it wouldn't need as much CPU usage
for the amount of traffic that Twitter gets.
Well, that's where cloud hosting comes into play
because they have different services like an app service
which could host the website files for Twitter,
storage buckets, which could store all the photos
and profile pictures and file uploads that users
are gonna put on Twitter, and it can scale infinitely.
And then you could also have database hosting
that can store all the tweets for Twitter.
Basically, cloud hosting introduced scalability
and flexibility to tech startups, so that way if
their particular platform needed a ton of storage space,
they could do that through the storage buckets.
Or if they had this massive database but they
didn't need as much power for their actual webpage,
they could do that with cloud hosting.
Instead of needing a dedicated server or a bunch
of dedicated servers where some
of the resources are getting wasted,
cloud hosting allows you to pinpoint
and target exactly which area
of your website needs the most power
and use the services to get the power
that you need without wasting resources.
Cloud hosting is definitely the most flexible form
of hosting, but the cost add up quickly
and it takes a lot to manage.
Whether you're using AWS, Google Cloud platform
or Microsoft Azure, cloud hosting is a beast of its own
and I generally wouldn't recommend it
unless you're an enthusiast or you know
that you need the power and flexibility of cloud hosting
and you're tech savvy or you have someone
on your team who is able to handle it.
Personally, most of my websites are hosted
on managed shared hosting and if you're wondering
which web hosts I recommend, I have
an entire comparison video on that here.