Many people don't know what hosting is. We mean they know what website is but when we as developers ask them what hosting they want or do they have one or even recommend one, we suddenly become aliens in their eyes. Let us explain this for you.
Today friend sent me a link to some online news and when I visited it I got nice white screen with following message:
We as developers know that this error means that hosting account has reached its resources limit ( Error 508 ) but let us explain this for you. Hosting can be described as one pc where instead of programs you have websites and if your computer/hosting is slow programs/websites will be slow or in this case unavailable. Many website owners often disregard importance of good hosting platform and because of that their websites loose visitors conversion to clients and in many cases visitors never return to it after they see errors like this since they dont know what they mean.
In most cases when you start looking for hosting you will get following offers: shared hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting and but not everywhere cloud hosting.
WHAT IS SHARED HOSTING?
Shared hosting is the cheapest hosting available to website owners and it provides you with great prices and in many cases theese hosting plans are excellent for beginning of your online presence adventure. But what is the downside? As its name states it is shared and this means that on one computer/server are located not only your website but many others and every plan has its defined resources which are available to you. One more downside is that you are sharing those resources with other users or should we say website owners.
If you are having html website this plan is great for you since html website is not resource heavy and you will save a lot of money this way, but if you decide to use for example Joomla!, WordPress or any other cms system which will give you ability to have advanced features on your website after some time you will have issues as shared plans will not be able to handle requests from visitors properly as your online presence grows. Another issue is security of shared hosting servers, if shared hosting or some website on same server where your website is located gets hacked your site is going down also.
Shared hosting is great for beginning but on long time terms it will not suit your needs.
WHAT IS VPS HOSTING?
VPS hosting stands for Virtual Private Server hosting and main difference is you have guarantied resources available to you and those resources are not shared with anyone. Also it will provide you with much more features and it is not locked so much as shared hosting. With vps hosting you will gain more speed and more control also when your website is in question. In many cases this hosting is that sweet middle spot you need when your website is in question.
WHAT IS DEDICATED HOSTING?
Dedicated hosting plans are similar to vps hosting as you have dedicated resources to you (cpu,ram,storage) but in this hosting type you are stored on separate physical machine and you have full control over it. You will find two types of it in general and those are managed and non managed. Managed ones are those servers which are set up by hosting company and you don't have full root control over server and this is good if you are not that much technical savvy. Non manged ones are giving you full conrol over server and without adequate technical knowledge you will not be able to utilize it properly but when done right you will make your website fast and able to handle everything users thrown at you.
Bottom line is almost everyone started from shared hosting but as we grow we in many cases forget to upgrade our hosting plans. But when errors like 508 starts showing in many cases it is to late.
If you have questions about your hosting account or need to adjust it to suit your needs don't hesitate to call us or drop message on our international support forum.
