What type of hosting is right for my website?

This article is aimed at anyone who is not able to differentiate between the types of hosting available on the market and who wants to find the best hosting solution for their website.

Just like the different types of accommodations available on the real estate market, the data stored on a website should also have a suitable roof to fit your wishes and your means. Whether you want to rent an apartment or privately book a whole floor of a hotel, Infomaniak has the right hosting package for you.

Shared Hosting

Analogy: You rent an apartment in a joint ownership property and share the management costs in collaboration with your neighbours. You can choose the size of your apartment as well as several options in a catalogue.

This type of hosting is adapted for 95% of websites. It consists of putting your site on a server which hosts other websites (from around a hundred sites to several thousand depending on the hosting service provider).

All the sites on the server share the resources of the machine they are hosted on. It is therefore possible for a site which is greedier than others to help itself to more of the machine’s shared resources and reduce its neighbours’ resources.

Infomaniak ensures it distributes the greedier sites in terms of resources equitably in order not to penalise the more modest ones. What is more, we host the other data such as email or databases on separate servers to increase security and performance.

• Advantages: flexible, inexpensive and evolutive (option of migrating to a Cloud Server in 1 click).
• Disadvantages: resources shared with other sites on server, little flexibility on the available technologies.

Discover our Web hosting and our Web + Mail hosting.

Dedicated Server

Analogy: You own your detached house and have none of the problems of neighbours that an apartment has. When it is built, you customise your house to suit your wishes. If you decide to expand or transform your house later on, always expect to stay in a hotel while the work is being carried out…

Although it is still perceived as the panacea when your Shared Hosting is no longer enough, this type of hosting is today obsolete and replaced by the Cloud Server.

This type of hosting offers the option of setting the dimensions of your server to fit your tastes (choice of operating system, software, databases, processor, memory size, etc.) and putting your sites there without worrying about interference from your neighbours. It is in the case of breakdowns, rebooting or hardware updating (processor, memory, storage space, etc.) that the Dedicated Server proves to be a real source of inconveniences.

The Dedicated Server was an alternative to a Shared Hosting from 1994 to 2014 with Infomaniak. It is still offered by several hosting service providers, even if it is now obsolete compared to the advantages offered by a Cloud Server.

• Advantages: server resources completely dedicated to your sites.
• Disadvantages: service interrupted in the event of breakdowns and software/hardware updates.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Analogy: you live in a terraced house. You can make modifications and adjust the rooms within the limits of the space available.

This solution, which was fashionable from the 2000’s up to 2014, was a Dedicated Server “sliced” into several pieces. Unlike the Shared Hosting, it was compartmentalised and was therefore not affected by the neighbours.

Advantages: the advantages of a Dedicated Server, without having to pay more.

Disadvantage: a VPS shares the same faults as a Dedicated Server, which is why this hosting solution has been replaced by the Cloud Server.

Cloud Server

Analogy: gold card holder for the “Infomaniak Datacentre Cloud” chain of hotels, you can occupy a room, three suites or privately book an entire floor in any of the hotel group’s buildings whenever you like and with just one click.

This type of hosting is perfectly suited to clients who want to move from a shared hosting to a more powerful and customisable hosting solution.

A Cloud Server is not limited by the hardware capacity of one sole server (Dedicated Server or VPS) or by the proximity of neighbours (Shared Server). Entirely flexible, this type of hosting allows you to adapt the resources you need in just a few clicks without interrupting the service.

When your sites develop, the Cloud Server adapts and provides you with the resources needed to allow you to be sure of an uninterrupted quality service while guaranteeing the security of your data.

• Advantages: decentralised, redundant, flexible and evolutive (uninterrupted), and more economical than a Dedicated Server.
• Disadvantages: more expensive than a shared server.

Discover our managed Cloud Servers and unmanaged Cloud Servers.

Very High Availability Hosting

Analogy: VIP gold card holder for the “Infomaniak HA Datacentre Cloud” hotel chain, you are organising a conference simultaneously in several hotels in the group. At the slightest problem in a meeting room, your guests are instantly tele-transported to an identical room without missing a second of the conference.

Considered the Rolls-Royce of hostings, the High Availability Cloud Server is based on a minimum of 6 Cloud Servers distributed on several datacentres (belonging to Infomaniak and based in Switzerland) for total redundancy (synchronisation of information in order to ensure its security in the event of an incident).

In order to guarantee security and minimise risks, this type of hosting requires the prior implementation of a specific environment by the client (development, pre-production and production servers). A HA Cloud Server therefore implies a close collaboration between the client and the hosting service provider and functions based on a contract (SLA).

Technically, Infomaniak manages the load balancers and ensures the synchronisation of the databases. You just have to deploy your services on your different Cloud Servers.

• Advantages: decentralised, totally redundant, evolutive, and under SLA contract.
• Disadvantages: more expensive than a Cloud Server.

Conclusion

Shared hostings, Cloud Servers and HA Cloud Servers represent the best hosting solutions today. They are beneficial, flexible, evolutive and offer several advantages compared to the older types of hosting, such as Dedicated Servers or VPS.

Discover all our hosting packages.

Steve Raffner