In the world of web hosting, there are several options that a user must know before buying a web hosting service.

First of all, the user must know the expectations of his web project, whether it will lead to a large number of visitors or if the project initially will be only for a small audience. It is also very important to know the type of resources that the Project will need.

The 3 general options we can find to accommodate the contents of our website are: Shared Hosting, VPS or virtual server and dedicated server. Let's see what the difference between these different concepts.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most basic of the three, it is a web hosting account which as its name suggests, share the machine with many other websites. It is the most economical option to start and mostly used by the end customer.

Advantages: Reasonably economical price. We should not worry about managing the server, we have tools like Backup, control panel, security all included in the price.

Disadvantage: Being in a shared machine, our neighbors can affect us, for example if a neighbor consumes more resources then our website can become slow. 

Virtual Hosting (VPS)

A VPS server is a virtual machine that has the same functional characteristics as a dedicated server. The difference is that the VPS is a portion of a dedicated server. For your understanding, imagine an entire server divided into 4 parts, for example, this would give us as a result of 4 VPS into a Dedicated Server. The advantage of the VPS hosing is that you get dedicated resources, on a physical machine or node that is the dedicated server that contains our VPS.

Advantages: Guaranteed Resources. You are not affected by what happens in the web of our neighbors.

Disadvantages: Higher price. You must know how to manage a server or hire a system.

Dedicated Hosting

A Dedicated server is a complete machine for you. The resources are absolutely availability for your machine. In a dedicated server you can easily create multiple hosting accounts to host multiple sites or even, virtualize it to create your own VPS.

Advantages: All resources of the machine. Do not share anything.

Disadvantages: Higher price. You must know how to manage a server or hire a system.

In short, you can see that each type of hosting has different characteristics and each responds to specific needs.

Many users are not able to recognize which option is best for them, and that is why they can contact a hosting company for advice and to point them what is the best option for their projects.

As we have said before, the most common and cheapest option is shared hosting, but beware, not all projects are suitable to be hosted on a shared hosting, because in some cases, our website can have a high consumption of resources forcing us to have to choose a VPS or Dedicated Server to get full web site potential.

Our recommendation is to analyze your requirements for web hosting, analyze the target audience to which you will go and the platform on which to build your website. Only by knowing this information, you can know in advance what might be the destination where to keep our files.

Author Bio: Eduardo González from "Indedmedia Hosting" - Expert in hosting services, 10 year experience providing support for business.