A business website is a powerful asset that promotes a company and showcases its expertise to prospects. This is why businesses invest a lot in the design and creation of a website. But all that effort put into the website will be for naught if the business chooses a poor hosting provider. The safest hosting option that many businesses in the Middle East consider involves leasing or buying a server from a leading provider in the dedicated server hosting Dubai industry. But that’s a topic for another day. 

This article covers a few common questions that web owners may ask when looking for a potential web hosting service provider. 

Let’s get started. 

Q: Aren’t all web hosts providing the same kind of services?

A: Technically, they are all providing hosting servers to accommodate one’s website. But the services may not be the same in all cases. They may vary in nature and price for starters. Look at it this way, there are many car manufacturers in the world. They are all making cars. But are they making the same cars? 

Every web hosting company may not offer all kinds of hosting services. Some may offer complimentary services as well. For instance, VPS hosting companies in Dubai cater to web owners who require Virtual Private Servers. Dedicated hosting companies, on the other hand, offer complete dedicated servers for each client. The hosting solutions offered could be different in terms of features, nature, support, and pricing. 

Q: What is a data center?

A: A data center is the place that houses the hosting provider’s servers and storage systems. It’s typically a secure facility with the hosting company’s fully configured servers stacked up neatly. Data centers have high bandwidth internet connection which allows them to provide faster service to their clients. The website will be hosted on a server at a secure data center. 

Hosting on the cloud is a different deal however. The cloud’s incredible scalability and adaptability made cloud hosting a big deal today. As a matter of fact, the cloud hosting Dubai industry has seemingly overtaken the dedicated server industry hosting thousands of sites on the cloud. Because they are on the cloud, cloud hosting isn’t about a single server. Even if one server in the cloud network fails, another will take over without interrupting the hosting service or affecting the website performance in any way. 

Q: How many types of hosting are there? 

A: The most popular types of web hosting available in the Middle East include:

• Shared Hosting
  
• VPS Hosting
  
• Dedicated Server Hosting
  
• Cloud Hosting
  

There are subcategories to these 4 main types. For instance, some may come across a free hosting offer. In such cases, the website will be on a shared hosting server along with many other websites. Instead of charging for the hosting service, the host is likely to generate revenue by displaying ads on the hosted websites. 

VPS hosting also houses many websites from many web owners in one single server pretty much like a shared server. However, each tenant will have a virtual partition in the server which is independent from other partitions i.e. each virtual partitions can have different operating systems and configurations. 

Dedicated servers are costlier than VPS servers but there will only one tenant in the server. The web owner can host more than one of his/her websites in a dedicated server without worrying about other tenants utilizing server resources. 

Conclusion

This is it for Part 1 of the Web Hosting FAQ series. Make sure to ask a lot of questions to hosting companies before choosing one to host the website on. The quality of the hosting service can make or break a business relying on a well-built website.