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Building your website is a lot of work, especially if its your first. Theres a lot to think about and several different steps to take care of along the way. You have to choose and register a domain name. You have to design each page of your website, link them together and test your site every step of the way. Once your site is ready to go, you have one very important choice to make: deciding on a webhost for your new site! While there are a lot of free hosting options out there and these arent necessarily a bad choice if youre just starting out with your first website, youll want to switch to paid hosting at some point. If your site is a business oriented one or you expect a lot of visitors, youll want to go with paid hosting from the start.

Thankfully, paid doesnt have to mean expensive and there are affordable web hosting options which can provide the services you need at a price which fits into your budget. To find affordable web hosting which works for you, you should learn a little more about the different types of web hosting to ensure that youre purchasing a hosting package which truly meets your needs and can accommodate your site as it grows.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is usually the lowest cost web hosting option. Its an affordable web hosting solution if youd like to get your site online quickly and on a budget. Shared hosting plans usually provide the important features like plenty of disk space for your sites content, even if you have large multimedia files to host. There will also be the bandwidth you need to accommodate the many visitors youll soon have and common additions like MySQL databases and PHP scripting to add dynamic interactive features to your site. In many cases multiple shared hosting is also available, allowing you to host several domains all with one affordable web hosting plan.

Shared hosting (also called mass hosting or virtual hosting) is exactly what it sounds like; your website is hosted on a server which also hosts other websites. This makes these websites easier (and less costly) for the webhost to maintain. However, there is a trade off in that the servers resources are split among the different sites hosted on the server. If your website is relatively small and doesnt have a massive amount of traffic, this shouldnt be a problem and shared hosting is a good affordable web hosting choice for your site as you get started.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting significantly costs more than shared hosting, but differs on how the server resources are used. This type of web hosting allows you to rent an entire server for your own personal use. There are no other websites hosted in these types of servers so you can add all of your major sites and control more server options. Major benefits include better website security and greater speeds even during heavy traffic periods. This type of web hosting is recommended for people maintaining large corporate websites or community sites that have plenty of multimedia content intended for a large audience.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is similar to shared hosting with one important difference ” when you use reseller hosting, you can choose which sites share a server with yours. You can also simply become a reseller without hosting your own site on the server. Youre allowed to use your own branding for your reseller hosting efforts and offer customized server setup and features. The exact details of the arrangement, however, vary from one hosting provider to another.

After you found a reputable hosting company, carefully analyze the different types of plans offered. Web hosting plans are packages that you should keep for years to make the costs worth it. Once your site is ready to advance, upgrade your package so you can constantly enjoy managing your website without problems.