Types of full featured webhosting

Webhosting services are provided to the customers by the service providers in various ways. Full featured webhosting is one such hosting service. This involves leasing out a portion or complete web server to the customer. Though the service is available at a high price, there are certain interesting services which can be of great help to the customer. The different types of this type of hosting are dedicated hosting, virtual private server and co-location etc. Each one of them comes packed with some useful features.

In the dedicated form, the customer is provided a server on lease which is completely dedicated to him/her. The hardware and the operating system are chosen by the customer and the other features are as per his/her choice only. Since this is a premium service, it comes at a premium price as well. However, there are loads of advantages associated with this form. For example you would get large bandwidth and you can get space of multiple terabytes. Further, your site would remain active for 24 hours, 7 days a week for the complete year!

This ensures that your customers can access your website at any time and during any part of the year without any problems. This is very important for some websites which deal in ecommerce and have huge transaction volumes. For example for auction websites like eBay, 24 hour operation is important as the customer can access this site at any part of the day. Inactivity of few minutes can translate into huge loss of revenue for such sites.

Another important type is Virtual Private Server. In this type, several parts of the same server are allotted to different customers. Each part would have different operating system as per the individual choice of each customer. Each of them can be maintained separately and thus can be rebooted at different times. Further, it would not be known to any one of the different clients that they are sharing any space with any other user. Thus, all features of dedicated form of hosting are available at a fraction of costs to all the users.

However, the space available will be comparatively lesser as the same server space is divided among various users. Another important feature of this form of hosting is that the same server can be organized into different systems such as live system, sand box system and development system etc. One can perform various testing related activities in the sand box system. This has all the features of a production system which is in use.

A number of servers can be set up at different places which are known as co-location centers. Important business related information can be stored at such data centers and in case of any problem; these can be used to retrieve the lost information. Further, this ensures that your website remains active round the clock. However, such service is available at a high cost as multiple servers are involved and the maintenance charges such as air conditioners, physical safety and access etc can be quite high.