Web hosting packages can be confusing – especially if this is your first time looking for a hosting plan. To help you with all the jargon, here’s a breakdown of the projects you’ll most likely find.

Managed Hosting: when you sign up for managed Hosting, the hosting company you’re working with will dedicate one or two employees solely to ensure your site runs right. When something goes wrong, your site will be fully managed. Managed Hosting is available with both shared and dedicated plans.

Shared Hosting: This type of plan sounds exactly how it sounds. You will be sharing a server with many other sites. Typically, those sites are smaller and don’t take up much bandwidth. But, if one place starts to suck too much bandwidth, your site could slow down. That’s why we recommend dedicated hosting for any site that requires full attention or for any site owner who wants to avoid a potential slowdown.

Dedicated Hosting: once again, the name says it all. With reliable Hosting, you won’t have to share a server. You will get your server, and your site won’t be slowed down thanks to another location on your server. If you combine dedicated hosting with managed Hosting, you’ll win the hosting battle.

Linus Hosting: if you’re using a web development tool built for Linux, you’ll want Linux hosting. Most development tools (like WordPress) are made for Linux, but don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to use Linus to set up this plan!

Windows Hosting: using Microsoft tools to set up your site? If so, you’ll want a Windows Hosting plan. These plans can be found if you look around, though they aren’t quite as popular as Linux plans.

Colocation: if you want control over your Hosting, set up colocation. Or, in other words, a situation where you own all of your software and hardware. In this instance, your hosting company will only ensure that your server is running, but you control all the rest from your end. This is only recommended if you know what you’re doing, and colocation hardly ever pays off (it’s not cheaper when you compare!).

Need help picking a hosting plan? We’re here to make sure that you choose the right one. But I will say this: dedicated Hosting is almost always how you want to run a business website. Otherwise, you run into all kinds of risks. Just look at the other posts on this site!