Server hosting involves the provision of the essential infrastructure to IT users for running their operations smoothly. The hosting provider provides its customers remote access to server resources including CPU, memory, disk space and bandwidth to power their applications including websites thereby saving the hassle of buying and maintaining the server hardware themselves. 

While dedicated server hosting in India is recommended for big businesses, hosting companies offer a variety of plans to cater to the varying server requirements of small and medium businesses. 

Types of Server Hosting Plans

Businesses prefer to focus on the actual operations rather than dealing with the technical aspects of running their online portals or websites. And this is possible when they allocate the running and maintaining of their websites to specialists who have the necessary expertise to deal with the security, safety and support issues. These web hosting providers run data centres that house the servers used to store the client websites and their data. 

The various types of hosting plans are:

1. Shared Hosting: As the name suggests this type of hosting involves sharing a server and its resources with other websites. Shared hosting plans are the cheapest and most cost-effective for small or new websites which have limited traffic. The risk related to performance issues arising out of shared servers can be managed by resource protection measures that identify websites using excessive resources and temporarily assigning them to isolated systems. 

This feature allows a hosting provider to ensure that your website performance is not affected. Shared hosting plans include hosting of a website, a free domain name, unmetered bandwidth, certain number of subdomains, a free SSL certificate and regular malware scans.  Some hosting providers also offer their customers the option of adding on more services on payment of some extra charges.

1. VPS Hosting: VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting plans include allocation of a server to a specific number of websites. Here the posting provider splits the main server into multiple virtual servers, allocating different sections to different clients or website owners. These virtual sections can then be customised and used solely by the individual websites to whom they have been allocated. 
2. Dedicated Hosting: Ideally the best option because these plans include sole access to the resources of a server for a single website and promise peak performance. But dedicated server hosting in India is also the most expensive type of server hosting. Website owners opting for dedicated plans get complete control over the choice of software, the configurations and even the operating system. Highly suitable for large e-commerce establishments that witness huge traffic on a regular basis, dedicated hosting plans also come with different management levels. 
3. Cloud Hosting: A recent concept, cloud hosting plans offer several remote servers with each server having different responsibilities. In case of a problem with one server, other servers take charge and allow the continuation of operations. Another advantage of cloud hosting plans is that they allow users to scale up resources when required. 

Choosing the right server hosting plan is particularly important for ensuring the optimum performance of your website. Make your decision in accordance with the type of your website, the amount of traffic you get or are expecting, the type of data you are placing on your website, your budget and the flexibility offered by the hosting plan. If your hosting provider offers you the option to scale up your hosting or add more servers when required, you can start with reasonably priced shared hosting plans.