Which hosting option to choose?

So you finally decided to place your site online, now what? There are so many types of hosting options, which one should you choose? Well, the answer is mainly influenced by two factors - your budget and technical skills.

The most basic and economical hosting option is Shared Web Hosting. Your website will be hosted on a server, shared with other customers. This is also the simplest hosting option to manage. It is mainly suited for low traffic sites with basic resource requirements.

The next option is VPS Hosting. A virtual private server (VPS) gives you a fully-fledged operating system of your own, hosted on a machine shared with other customers. This slightly more expensive option gives you some degree of isolation, as well as increased performance and resource allocation.

If you feel that your site deserves a completely separate environment, free of impact of any other customer, and your budget allows it, then a Dedicated Server is the right option for you. Dedicated hosting gives you full, exclusive access to a server. Keep in mind that a dedicated server, whether in a managed or unmanaged hosting environment, requires some degree of technical knowledge.

How to find the best deal?

Finding the best hosting deal is not easy. There are many hosting providers to choose from, some better than others.

Price is of course a major factor, however, do pay attention to all other parameters: Bandwidth limit is important when you expect many site visits, Disk space allocation is important when you have lots of data to handle, and so on. Keep in mind that if the hosting package price or offer seems too good to be true, in most cases you should keep away. Use HostMonk providers ranking to evaluate the hosting provider, read other users' reviews and don't hesitate to ask our advice here.

Which platform should I choose?

Most of the world's web servers run with either a Microsoft Windows server operating system or a variant of Linux (UNIX).

Linux hosting packages are usually cheaper than the windows packages, but they would require specific technical skills that are not needed to manage a Windows server. Choose the platform that you have the most experience with, and that offers the services you require.