10 of the best web hosts of 2016

What Kind of Hosting Do You Need?

The number of hosting choices available to the perspective website owner can be overwhelming. It is possible to get hosting for a couple dollars a month — and sometimes free. And it is possible to get hosting that costs hundreds and even thousands of dollars a month. Yet to the uninitiated, they can seem the same. In fact, it sometimes looks like the cheaper plans offer more: unlimited bandwidth, storage, and email addresses! Why doesn't Amazon get in on that action? Well, as may not surprise you, hosting choices are more complicated than they may appear.

Types of Hosting

The majority of hosting plans can be categorized into five main types: Shared, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated, and Reseller. Let's look at each of them.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular and affordable hosting option. With it, you rent space on a shared server with other site owners. This means you're also sharing resources like bandwidth, memory, and processing power. This can be a problem, because a single server can support hundreds and even thousands of websites. Most of these websites will get very little traffic, allowing hosting companies to offer more resources to the small number who require them. But there are still limits.
Enough firepower for most small business and personal websites, shared hosting is the most affordable hosting type available. With it, you share server resources with other customers, so you have all the functionality of a professionally managed web server but only shoulder a small share of the server cost. Also see: Unlmited Hosting.
Note, however, that not all shared hosting is the same. Different companies use different servers with different amounts of resources. What's more, some companies host more websites on a server than others. So there may be a good reason to pay for $10 per month hosting rather than $1.99.

VPS

If you've exceeded the power offered by a shared hosting plan, virtual private server (VPS) hosting will arm you with increased performance without saddling you with the full cost of a dedicated server. VPS hosting provides greater performance, because fewer websites are using a single physical server. But just as important, it provides full control of your server. Although a VPS is not a physical server, in terms of management, it is. If you have special needs for your server, you have the control to address them.

Cloud

Cloud hosting is somewhat like VPS because the server is not the same as a physical machine. But cloud hosting is distributed over many computers. As a result, cloud hosting is extremely stable and scalable. If you find that your website is lagging because of lack of bandwidth, you can increase it with the flip of a switch. The same thing goes for disk space and CPU usage. If industry-leading uptime and rapid-scalability are your two biggest worries, cloud hosting might be just what you're looking for. Cloud hosting will give you access to a cluster of servers from which you can quickly provision resources when you need them, and enough separation from unruly server neighbors that your application is kept safe. VPS and Cloud services are sometimes combined into a hybrid service (sometimes called Cloud VPS or Scalable VPS).

Dedicated

If you're ready to be done sharing server resources dedicated hosting will provide you complete and unfettered access to a physical server. Useful for powering complex applications and advanced scripts, dedicated hosting provides the highest level of security and server customization possible. Also see: Colocation.