Virtual web hosting is becoming the most popular type of hosting available, primarily because it provides the most flexible and diverse hosting environment on existence. Whether you’re a professional online business owner, or a novice webmaster that is in search of a small hosting plan, virtual hosting can provide a solution for you.
The most popular form of virtual hosting is standard VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, however new concepts like the cloud computing environment are bringing virtual hosting plans to the next level. If you’re struggling to choose a type of web hosting for your web sites, then you may want to consider the following benefits of virtual hosting.
How Does Virtual Hosting Work?
The concept of virtual hosting is similar to the concept of an apartment building in some ways. The apartment building contains several apartments within the same structure, and people inhabit these apartments independently. If one of the apartments is not inhabitable for whatever reason, then the apartment building manager will move the tenant to another apartment.
With virtual hosting, you’re given a small partition (apartment) of a web server (apartment building), and you’re web sites are able to draw resources form this partition. However, if you need more resources, or your apartment is not big enough, you can easily upgrade to a larger virtual hosting plan by expanding the size of your partition. This expandability and flexibility is what has made virtual hosting so popular over the past 5 years.
What is Cloud Computing?
For webmasters that need an extremely powerful hosting solution, cloud computing offers a limitless hosting plan that can be expanded on the spur of the moment. This is possible because, rather than operating within a single web server, your hosting account is a virtual partition spread out over a network of web servers. As such, cloud VPS hosting could be compared to an apartment complex, rather than just a single building.
If you live in an apartment complex, you can easily upgrade to a larger apartment, and you have more freedom and space than a single apartment building. When you run out of space in your server partition, resources are pulled from other servers if needed, to provide a limitless amount of bandwidth and disk space (similar to relocating tenants in an apartment complex). This unlimited hosting structure works because at the end of each month you’re only billed for the resources you’ve used.
The Cost Of Virtual Hosting
Because virtual hosting is so diverse and flexible, the cost of VPS plans differs greatly, with small plans starting at about $10-$15 per month, and more comprehensive cloud VPS plan costing up to $300 per month or more, depending on your total monthly usage. If you own a lot of web sites, then you may want to consider starting with a cloud VPS plan, whereas novice webmasters with only one or a few sites could easily get by with a conventional VPS hosting package. Regardless of which virtual plan you choose, VPS hosting certainly carries many advantages over the conventional shared hosting environment.
