Personal vs Business Web Hosting: How to know which package suits your site

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Getting the right web hosting service is perhaps the most important decision you can ever make when it comes to starting your website.

As publishing your website online requires a web hosting service, you’ll also have to ensure the web hosting company can guarantee optimal service, with such terms like up-time, reliability and support among the most important factors to consider in almost all the instances.

Also read: How the Web Host Server Location affects Your Website SEO

Here, we shall be talking about choosing between Personal and Business Web Hosting: How to know which package will suit your site requirements. But first, let’s explain what the term web hosting means for those who are hearing it for the very first time.

Personal vs Business Web Hosting

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service that provides the technologies needed for a website or web page to be viewable on the Internet. The website is hosted, or served, from special computer systems called servers. And whenever an Internet user wants to view the website, they’ll simply need to type the website address or domain name into their web browser.

The companies that run such services are known as Web Hosting Providers, while most of the web hosting providers do require that you must have your domain name in order to host your website. Also, the hosting companies provide domain name registration service and will help you to purchase one if you don’t already have a domain.

There are two main options when considering your web hosting plan. Either a personal hosting account or business/corporate hosting service. And typically, the choice you make should depend on the type of site you are looking to operate.

Most times a personal web hosting plan might be all you need to kick-start your website, but sometimes you may require a bigger package in the business hosting account. So what differences are there between personal and business web hosting, and how do you actually know which will be suitable for your website?

What is Personal Web Hosting?

Personal web hosting is a shared hosting plan, which means you share the server with several other accounts. And because of this, it tends to be extremely cheaper than business web hosting, but then it also has a lot of limitations.

This type of hosting plan may be ideal for home-based business sites, fan pages, personal or hobby blogs. As the resources available for personal hosting tend to be enough to host such sites and can even allow you to receive hundreds, or sometimes thousands of visitors daily with no performance issues.

If you’re a beginner to web hosting, personal hosting accounts are ideal, and if you ever require more resources in the future you can easily upgrade to a higher package.

What is Business Web Hosting?

Business or corporate web hosting is geared more towards companies that require higher resources in terms of disk space, CPU, and RAM, with more available features like daily backups, analytics and website statistics, which are all very important if you are running a big business.

This hosting plan can be used for any kind of business, however, the key to making a choice is to match your website requirements with the specific package on offer, either personal, or business web hosting.

The business web hosting can further be broken into Dedicated and Collocated Hosting.

1. Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting means your website is allocated the entire web server. What this means is that instead of sharing web servers, your website is allowed to run its own web server, which guarantees faster performance, as all the server resources are entirely available to only your website.

Though this plan comes at a much higher cost, it is a great choice if your website requires a lot of resources or a high level of security.

2. Collocated Hosting

Collocated Hosting is when you purchase your very own server and house it at a given web host’s location. What it means is that you rent space in a data centre or rack in order to place your web server and utilize bandwidth and IP address from the host.

In this plan, you’ll be responsible for the cost of the entire server itself. But the obvious advantage is that you have full control of the server and can install scripts or applications as you require.

How to know which Hosting package suits your website

When it comes to choosing a web hosting account, most of the choices are centred around the available resources between the different plans. That is why you need to compare a typical personal (shared) web hosting plan to a business hosting plan to see if the figures concerning available resources is massively apart.

And also bear in mind that there is a likely price increase between the plans, so whether your site requires a business or personal hosting plan, it’s very important to know what budget you’ll be needing from the outset. If not, you’d either end up running out of resource or unable to pay and get cut off from the service.

In summary, personal websites don’t usually take up much space, so personal hosting plans are ideal. But businesses use much more bandwidth and utilize more memory and processing power, therefore as a high volume traffic website requires business web hosting.

Conclusion

As UK business hosting means resource-intensive, high traffic websites, you should opt for it only if your website requirements cuts across the extremes. Also, note that the need to configure your website with a certain level of optimization is not just a case of adding disk space or more processing power to make the website to run faster.

A website with high traffic that runs sluggishly can be optimized without additional hardware. Just a little change in the software configuration or the database system can result in better performance and typically, such business web hosting packages come with optimization options in place.

Before opting for a web hosting service, it is very important to know what kind of resources your website needs, your business security requirements, budget, and other types of services that are available for the web host offers.

Get help from the AI Web Hosting Advisor or talk to the Web Hosting Consultant personally.

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