Shared, virtual private server, dedicated, and co located which flavor of Web hosting is right for us? Find out the pros and cons of each, and whether we’re paying too much for what we really need.

It might be easier to count the number of flavors one can find in ice creams or in choclate than to count the different web hosting flavors. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but going by the current trend it does not seem far from reality.

Free Hosting, Shared Hosting, Semi-Dedicated Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Virtual Private Server(VPS) Hosting, Managed Hosting, Budget Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Custom Hosting” and so on is what we see upon doing a simple search for hosting on the Web.

The search shows a number of results referring to different flavors of web hosting, in essence they all are variations of four main flavors: the famous four (Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and Co-located).

If we talk about shared hosting then What is it?: Sometimes referred as Virtual Hosting, “Shared Hosting” offers the customer a fixed allocation of disk space (data storage capacity) on a server as well as fixed bandwidth (data transfer capacity). This type of service allows a customer to leverage all the features and services that a dedicated server offers at a fraction of cost, and does not involve any server administration overhead.

While Pros is: Freedom from maintaining the server hardware as well as managing the server security and administration. Complete technical support is usually included with these packages.

At the same time Cons is: Does not offer root access to the server and hence access to the core functions is limited. Resources are shared by multiple sites hosted on the same server. A technical problem in one of the sites owned by a different client on a shared server may cause a system wide crash, bringing down all the other sites.

In other hand VPS that is Another form of virtual hosting is Virtual Private Server(VPS) aka Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS), which creates several logical/virtual servers on a single physical server using software. The major difference in shared and VPS hosting is how the resources are shared. Each virtual server created this way performs as if it were an independent physical server and eliminates the disadvantages of shared hosting.

A complete contrast from virtual/shared hosting, dedicated hosting dedicates a server and all its resources for hosting the sites of choice by the customer. Though this type of service offers complete control over the the system and its resources, it usually requires the customer to undertake the administration on their own.

Colocation is about placing something that we own at a place where it can be hooked up to the Internet. For example, with an ISP or at a data center (DC) multi-homed to the backbones.