Web hosting needs and demands fluctuate as a business develops. For different projects, different kinds of contracted web hosting are available. For each project, looking at your needs for reliability, support and control and weighing them against cost and technical involvement. Sometimes total control drives decision making and in other situations it is simply more cost effective to outsource to the lowest cost vendor.
When approaching a new project, the first question that starts the conversation is 'host in our office' or 'host with a vendor'. With a business based in South Florida, with the accompanying daily storms, the question is not 'if the power were to go out', but rather 'when the power goes out'. And its not just the power outage, its also the communication/internet outages that we would have to contend with. So, for a company based in South Florida, for example, hosting with an outside vendor with best in class resources is an easy conclusion.
Defining where and how meant coming to terms with the offerings and the nuances. We have found that web hosting has evolved over the past few years and not only are there many vendors, there are also many different kinds of hosting accounts available. Four main segments exist: shared, managed, virtual and dedicated. As you go from shared to dedicated hosting, flexibility, performance and control increase - and so does cost.

Shared hosting is web hosting with limited access to the underlying machine. Generally, you are limited to uploading your files to your folder. Shared hosting accounts come on both Windows and Linux platforms and usually include the various types of databases: MySQL and Microsoft SQLServer. The key advantage of shared hosting is it is extremely cheap. Accounts for less than $10 a month are common. The disadvantages are limited database size, limited database backups. Another more subtle disadvantage is that the webserver settings are controlled by the hosting company and are set for overall machine performance, rather than optimized for your website's needs. Customer Support is often limited and response time. This is the classic cut-rate, make it up in volume offering.

As computing technologies have evolved and as machines have gotten more powerful two new classes of hosting have been offered: virtual private servers and managed servers.
Managed servers give you more power and are useful for websites that get a lot of traffic. Fewer accounts share the underlying hardware, giving everyone better performance. Its also likely that in a big server farm, when competing for human attention, the managed servers are probably more attentively managed than the shared hosting. Similar to shared hosting, your access is limited to uploading files. At the same time, your performance is likely better as data centers can optimize and tune the performance for a machine that is handling fewer accounts.

The second variant, virtual private servers (VPS) gives the account holder more control. In this scenario, you have a slice of the entire machine that is uniquely yours. You have root access and can log in using software that allows you to have the whole graphical interface that you are familiar with on your laptop or pc. In this scenario, you have total control over your webserver and its settings, your database is under total control. If you have custom software, you can install it and run it. The hosting company will place few restrictions on you. The trade off is you take full responsibility for what happens on your machine - this includes viruses protection and backups. The big gains with virtual private servers are the total control over configuration. Where shared hosting might skimp on performance optimizations that load the server, in the virtual private server situation, you can let the server do file compressions and optimizations that can give your customers a markedly better experience. When we shifted our marketing website to a VPS and took control of the system settings, we saw a massive increase in performance.

The fourth choice is a dedicated server. In this case, the hardware is dedicated to your account and you share resources with no one. This option is best compared to self hosting in your own office. The dedicated server gives you the resources of a world class data center such as storm protection, backup power supplies and redundant networking that would be hard to replicate in your own office. From a cost perspective, this is similar to leasing equipment. The added cost acts as an insurance policy as the data center should be able to provide you with on-demand hardware replacements if a disk, motherboard or power supply goes bad. Additionally you likely have access to support personal that complement your own team, offering expertise in firewalls, networking and server configurations.

Today's market is extremely dynamic and there is great flexibility for the consumer. While there are discounts for long term contracts, most accounts have no time commitments and change is rather easy. We've found that the trade off in choices is really tied to the balance we would like to strike between technical involvement and the website's traffic demands.