What is the best host(ing) for me?

[justinOrel]

There are several types of hosting availble. Each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Below we listed the most common hosting options, starting with shared hosting for the light-weight websites, to Cloud hosting for the big guns.

Free Hosting
Free hosting is not actually a kind of hosting, but since many members ask for this we thought we would explain it here. As you will find in a lot of threads around these forums, free hosting always has a catch. Either your website shows adverisements, gives little to no resources available, doesn't allow you to use your own domain name, etc.
If you're making a website for family and friends, free hosting might be an option for you, but if you use it for business, stay away from it, as it looks very unprofessional!

Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most basic form of hosting, and perfect to be used by start-up websites and/or websites with low traffic. Your website will be placed on a server together with other websites. This means that your website has to share the resources (CPU time, memory) with other websites running on the server, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as most hosters take care of balancing things out. Usually this is done by imposing a limit on the CPU time a website may take, i.e., a website may not take more than a set percentage of CPU time as that would be unfair to the other websites that run on the server, as their speed would decrease. Usually this limit is about 10-25% and the amount of data traffic you can have will be somewhere between several hundred mega bytes to a few gigabytes of data traffic available.
E-mail services on a shared hosting account will also be shared. If another account is spamming (or has been hacked with SPAM as the result), your account will be blacklisted, too, as it originates from the same IP address.

Virtual Dedicated Hosting
Virtual hosting is for the websites that have low to medium traffic. Your website will be placed on a server that has been virtually split into multiple servers. This means that each of the websites gets a predefined amount of CPU time and memory available, i.e., a portion of all CPU time and memory available. Because of this split, your website won't slow down when any other website running on the same server has a sudden increase in traffic, as your CPU time and memory are protected. Depending on how many other websites are run on the server you will usually get about 2 to 5% of CPU time and about 50 to a few hundred gigabytes of data traffic available.

Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is for the websites that have medium to high traffic. Your website will be the only one to run a server. Meaning all the server's CPU time and memory are dedicated to serving your website only. With dedicated hosting you will usually get several hundred gigabytes of data traffic.

CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is for the websites with high traffic. It means your website (or parts of your website) will be hosted on several servers around the world. When a visitor of your website requests a resource from the CDN, it will be referred to the server nearest to him, as to spread the server load over the different servers. This also has a speed advantage in that the nearer a server is located to the visitor, the less time it will take the visitor's PC to connect to that server.

Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the most expandable type of hosting and consists of several servers acting as one. The CPU time and memory usage will be spread out over the different physical servers, so there is no bottleneck on a single server. Cloud hosting can be easily upgraded by adding additional servers to the cloud, which increases the CPU time and memory avaible.