Tutorial Thursday: Hosting Classifications

Whether you’re starting to blog or if you are beginning your own website, one thing that you will need is a host. Hosting can be either free or paid. Hosting comes in different forms or services from thousands of hosts all over. Over the next few Tutorial Thursday articles we will look at various aspects of the hosting industry.

I’ll begin the series by getting down the the bare basics, i.e. hosting in its various forms.

Hosting can be classified in three ways, by price, by domain or by size.

By price

We have two types of hosting… you guessed it, free and paid.

Free Hosting

There is no such thing as a free meal, and there is no such thing as free hosting. Someone has to pay and this case it is the host who does.

You as the end user will receive the hosting for free. In return, most hosts display ads on your website. These ads could either be forced ads, where you have no control where it will be placed or they would give you the necessary adcode and ask you to place it on whichever part of the site you want.

There are very few hosts that give you totally ad free hosting. Some offer a smaller plan with reduced features, where you can buy additional features at a price. Others require you to join a discussion forum and contribute before you become eligible for hosting. While, still others cater to only a specific type of requirement.

There are several places you can search for free hosting. One such place I used regularly was Click Here Free. It is a free hosting directory where you can search for a host based on various criteria.

Two popular hosting services over time have been Yahoo! Geocities and Tripod. Both these have forced ads on your websites.

If you are starting out with web designing, and if you are on a shoestring budget, then you may consider looking at free hosting as your starting option. That is how I started out almost seven years back and continued there for more than two years before first moving to a paid host.

Paid Hosting

This by far is the more popular form of hosting. I lose track of the number of paid hosts tucked in every corner of the web.

Many hosts offer your ready packages with varying features at different prices. Wondering how to choose your host? I will cover this in a future article. Until then, let me point you to Web Hosting Talk one place I use whenever I’m searching for a new host. WHT is a very active forum that is frequented by several hosts. Read real experiences of users. You’ll also find some really good offers out there as well.

Moving on…