With all sorts of web hosting plans available, starting from free up to dedicated servers worth thousands and even server clusters, are you finding it difficult to find the right kind of hosting that fits your need? Read on for an idea about popular hosting offers.

There is no free luch, but there are free hosts. Basically you get two type of free hosts, the first one being that offer a specialised kind of hosting with tools to build powerful sites like blogs or a personal home page. Like a google pages account or a wordpress free blog.

The first kind is fine for personal sites and blogs. They offer excellent site building tools and are easy for newbie webmasters and bloggers to set up a web presense. But these are not the right options for the professional use. If you are serious about the site or expect to make it big in the future, atleast make sure that you use own domain name instead of the free subdomain offered by the host. That way, you can move out without losing all the links and bookmarks to your site in the future.

The second type, free PHP/MySQL hosting is never known to be reliable. Use them only for testing purpose or for a very short time, as these hosts could very much disappear any day.

Shared Hosting

Semi Dedicated Hosting

Semi dedicated hosting is the service offered by some hosts, where only a limited number of sites (10-50) are hosted on a single server. This is identical to shared hosting, but users are given more resources, so semi-dedicated servers can accommodate sites that have out grown shared hosting plans.

These days, very few companies offer semi dedicated servers, VPS hosting being a more popular choice for sites that are too big for shared hosting. On VPS, users get complete control of the servers and assured resources and they come nearly the same price as a semi dedicated server. But semi dedicated's still have the advantage of ease of using the service, as the server will be centrally managed by the host.

VPS Hosting

VPS is currently the most popular choice for sites that are too big for shared hosting and not big enough for a dedicated server. VPS is also preferred when the customer doesn't want to host his along with hundreds of sites on a shared service. For better security, more control and assured resources at reasonable rates, VPS is getting more popular.

VPS servers can cost anything between $20 - $100, depending on the configurations and server management.

Dedicated server is the ultimate high point of hosting. User is given the complete control of a server, to host any number of sites and use any configurations he like. Dedicated servers can be ordered to meet the exact requirements and can be upgraded as and when needed.

The cost of dedicated server can vary a lot depending on the kind of service you need from the host. The server that cost $100 from a value host can cost in excess of $500 from a premier service provider like Rackspace. There are different levels of server management which the user can select based on his skill levels and requirements.

A dedicated server can cost anything between $100 to few thousands USD. For bigger sites, it is possible to create a server cluster with number of servers and load balancing to assure redundancy and performance.

Cloud hosting is a new technology, that is getting mature and is seen as the future of we hosting. Sites hosted on a cloud hosting platform, runs on a clustered server environment, instead of a single server. This eliminates the risk of hardware failures and traffic spikes are handled a lot better. In fact, cloud hosting can handle sites that are too large for dedicated servers as well as sites that get sudden increase in traffic, equally well.