There are many different types of web hosting companies available in the market today. Choosing a web hosting provider depends on what type of website you want to have: hobby, blog, or ecommerce site. As a result, there are different flavors of hosting providers. Some of the most common web site hosting types are: shared, free, and dedicated hosting.

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Free web hosting services for example, place ads on the user's web pages and can be cumbersome and annoying for visitors. Other web hosting plans offer great support, options, and bandwidth but charge a monthly fee.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular web hosting plan. Shared web site hosting permits more than one site to be hosted on the same server. Here, the web hosts provide the system administration and the server maintenance. Benefits of a shared hosting site are programming features such as ASP, PHP, MySQL, large bandwidth, and multiple e-mail address capability. Compared to free web hosting, shared web hosting allows a user to have their own domain name. Shared hosting is a way for a hosting company to offer affordable web hosting to their clients while having more users on one server and thus less overhead costs.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated hosting is a good option for someone who wants more storage and bandwidth and control over the server. The advantages of having dedicated hosting are: unlimited databases and email addresses as well as unlimited bandwidth. Generally, a dedicated server plan offers the user with a monthly bandwidth of 500 GB to 1 TB. There are two types of dedicated web hosting plans: managed and unmanaged.

Managed hosting is hosting that is still controlled by the hosting company. In unmanaged dedicated web hosting, the user is the server administrator, permitting the user the greatest amount of control and flexibility. Unfortunately, unmanaged hosting is complicated and takes more time and expertise than a managed hosting solution.