Web hosting companies typically offer several different hosting packages. Two of them are appropriate for business. A third type, free hosting, is generally advertising supported and, therefore, not appropriate for businesses. The other two are shared hosting and dedicated hosting.

Shared Hosting Plans

Shared hosting means that your site will reside on the same hard drive as several other sites. From the outside world, all the sites appear to be on their own server. This may seem cramped, but there is more than adequate space on most server hard drives to accommodate several sites.

Shared hosting is generally less technically involved than is dedicated hosting and is very popular with businesses that need a web page but don’t employ a great deal of web applications on their site. It is fully compatible with technologies such as SSL, so online transactions can be handled securely.

Dedicated Hosting Plans

In this case, a site is hosted on a machine specifically dedicated to it and it alone. This form of hosting is usually used by very large sites and by sites that have high bandwidth requirements. Dedicated servers can generally be customized as much as one desires and can store enormous amounts of data. If your business doesn’t have an IT department and you don’t know what terms such as CPanel, H-Sphere, Apache and IIS mean, setting up a dedicated server may prove too complex a task.

In general, most businesses can have their needs met by shared hosting.