This article will look at the most popular types of website hosting: WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, and VPS hosting. Each of these has its pros and cons and is suitable for different types of Internet users.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is the most obvious choice for most budding website creators. This option will let you host several different websites on one server. WordPress hosting is one of, if not the most affordable website hosting types.

WordPress hosting plans are also very user-friendly. The starting package usually features a built-in cPanel. This easy to use software makes the day-to-day management of your website a breeze. You won’t need to deal with complicated technical issues either. On WordPress, even a person without any technical background can do their own maintenance.

The disadvantage of WordPress hosting, which is a type of shared hosting, is that the server can get overpopulated with sites and users and slow down.

Reseller Hosting

The main difference between reseller hosting and the other two options is that it lets you act as a hosting company. This means you make money by selling hosting or creating websites for third parties and you get a place where you can upload and run your website. The potential to make a profit is there, while the startup costs of reseller hosting are relatively low. What is more, you can create a unique control panel for each one of your clients.

Normally, a reseller hosting startup package includes disk space, domain hosting, bandwidth, consistent support by the hosting provider, and white labeling. On the downside, website hosting resellers have to deal with a massive number of customer requests regularly.

Admittedly, even the cheapest reseller hosting packages are more expensive than WordPress hosting and VPS hosting plans, which we’ll get to next.

VPS Hosting

This website hosting option may be the best of both worlds. You enjoy many of the benefits of dedicated hosting, but also quite a few of the advantages of WordPress hosting. VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server.” You rent the entire server for one or more websites when you sign up for such a plan.

This hosting option works best for sites that need highly customized server setup or ones that get a lot of traffic.

VPS hosting technology makes it possible for several different virtualized OS to run on one dedicated server at the same time. You don’t have to share your OS with anyone else or be concerned that other websites on the same server will gain access to your content for some inexplicable reason.

VPS hosting is a guarantee that a certain volume of RAM will be available to you at all times. It’s quite the opposite with WordPress hosting and other shared hosting users, who always worry that another user might use up the RAM.

What to Look for When Choosing the Best Website Hosting

After you’ve chosen a web hosting type, the next logical step is looking for a provider. This is no less challenging than choosing a hosting type, so we’ve decided to dedicate a section to that as well.

The most important factors are speed and uptime. Beyond those, individual needs should be taken into account.

Speed is crucial because you aren’t going to get much traffic and conversions if your site is slow. This is a reason we recommend local hosting. Test the provider’s page speed load time and keep looking if their server response time is over 200 ms.

Another reason why speed is really important is because it is a factor in your Google ranking.

It goes without saying (but we’ll mention it anyway) that uptime should exceed downtime. The minimum site uptime is 98%. Use server monitor tools, most of which are free, to find out what the host’s uptime is.

Finally, consider what type of website you are building, what apps you need, whether you need special software, and how much web traffic you can accommodate. Think about how you want your company to be doing in 6 or 9 months. If you have no clue, start with WordPress hosting. It is cheap, easy to support and maintain, and has a sufficient number of features for most new sites.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article about the different types of web hosting has been useful. Our tips on what to look for in a hosting provider are a good start if you’re entirely new to this and have never had a site before.