Windows hosting remains a popular choice among users because of the ease and flexibility that accompanies it. The popularity of windows hosting can be directly attributed to the world wide acceptance of windows operating system for individuals, small businesses and enterprises which helped pave the way for it. For detailed and unmatched information on Windows hosting check out http://webhostingreview.info/windows-hosting/. In this article, I am going to focus on different flavors of windows hosting which vary according to their inherent features and how they align with the scale and magnitude of different enterprises.
Free Hosting
As evident from the name, free hosting entails service provision by a windows based server without any charges. There is a plethora of free hosting service providers on the internet which provide various packages with varying space, bandwidth and other factors. Free hosting providers generate their income by embossing various advertisements and other promotional material on a freely hosted site. Free hosting is ideal for personal websites, blogs and other such endeavors which don’t require complex settings and specialized peripheral as they don’t tend to be resource intensive. The drawbacks of such hosting are as follows:
- Exclusion of email addresses accompanying domain name
- Having a subdomain name instead of your own customized one. This may make your domain name long, hard to remember and unappealing
- Mostly scripts like PHP, Perl or CGI are not allowed
- No substantial monetary benefits can be gained
Shared Hosting
This form of windows hosting is most popular and cost effective. It neither necessarily burden the hosted sites with advertisements nor have any of the other limitations of free hosting. Share hosting is ideal for small and new businesses which at the onset can’t afford to invest heavily in hosting solutions. Shared hosting entails multitude of users of various types all using the resources of the same server. Like free hosting, shared hosting is not ideal for sites that are resource intensive. Since every resource of the hosting server like CPU cycles, bandwidth and storage is shared, a user can experience downgraded performance if any of the other users is consuming a large volume of the aforementioned resources. Shared hosting also doesn’t allow the installation of modules and programs on server which may be crucial for some website owners.
Virtual Private Server
VPS is a very versatile form of windows hosting as it can be comprised of different types of hardware catering to a multitude of end users. The amount of control a user has on their VPS hosted site varies from one VPS hosting company to another. Virtual private servers allow their users the added benefit of selecting which operating system they want as they cater to both Linux and Windows. The inherent versatility of VPS allows it to host various sites, blogs and other endeavors simultaneously for Windows and Linux.
Dedicated Hosting
This is perhaps the most expensive form of windows hosting but totally worth it for various reasons:
- No sharing of resources with other users, as the whole server can be rented by a single user
- Users can choose to manage this server by themselves or have it managed by the service provider
