Choosing a hosting provider

Revision date: 27 Apr 2006

Types of hosting

First thing that should be mentioned is that there are different hosting types. The following of them are mostly available:

Free hosting

There is a large amount of web space you won't have to pay for. But still, for e-commerce purposes it's hard to imagine any reason why we could recommend to decide on it. Such web hosting is extremely limited by all measures. Free hosts always place their own banners, text links or even pop-up windows with advertisement. Mostly they allow only a web-based file uploading (not via FTP) and browser-based editing. Traffic and disk space provided is not enough for a serious project, moreover, in case their servers are overloaded there's a great chance that your site will often be inaccessible for long periods. As for the site address (URL), the best you can expect is something like http://yoursite.hostingprovider.com or http://www.freewebspace.com/~yourname but never think or http://www.yourstore.com or any other 2nd level domain name to be granted for free.

Overall, only non-commercial or personal web projects get their start via free web hosting.

Shared hosting

Using shared (aka virtual) hosting your site will share the same physical web server with dozens (up to hundreds) of others. A serious problem (such as configuration errors or overload) with a single site can be fatal for all the others. There are also some access and configuration restrictions (i.e. as you are not usually provided with your own copy of server software like Apache or PHP, you are not granted with rights to edit server configuration files, install new modules and so on). However, such restrictions are nowhere near as strong as in case of free hosting. As for shopping cart software, this type of hosting is mostly suitable, still, be sure to ask the hosting administration if it's possible to install any additional modules or make configuration changes on demand. Our X-Cart recommended hosting partners offer a wide range of virtual hosting plans so you'll easily find the one that's suitable for your project.

Virtual Private Server (or Virtual Dedicated Server) hosting

Designed to avoid the problems related to shared hosting infrastructures, VDS hosting offers the benefits of a dedicated server at affordable (a bit increased, of course) shared hosting prices. The main idea is following: all sites use the same physical (hardware) server and its components (CPU, RAM, HDD), but every site or account works on a separate software Web server, i.e. on a dedicated copy of software environment which behave exactly like an isolated stand-alone server. This way it's possible to configure every aspect of your site's environment, add or remove necessary program components and edit server and component configuration files, obtain remote root (administrator) access.

Reseller hosting

This is a good and reasonable deal for those who are going to sell Web hosting themselves. Getting a large disk space and bandwidth one can divide it up among any number of separate sites he wants and sell it to others at any price. Several reseller accounts usually share one physical server but there are fewer of them comparing to the sharing hosting.

Dedicated hosting

With dedicated hosting, you lease your own hardware server. As a rule, there are no restrictions applicable to them except for those designed to protect the hosting network security. The user has to install and configure the software environment completely on his own or choose the hosting plan which includes the primary configuration service. Please note that this proposition is usually offered at much higher price in comparison with shared hosting and should only be considered by projects requiring high level of server-side customization, performance and expecting to serve at least several thousands of customers daily.

Colocated hosting

Simular to the previous one, but you have to buy the server yourself depending on your needs and install it at the data center. This is the most expensive and least cost effective option if you are not colocating many servers. User must pay extra for many services dedicated hosting provides by default. Colocated hosting is generally chosen by people with server administration experience and those with more significant needs than which can be satisfied by dedicated or shared hosting.