Fast web hosting might be something quite overrated. It’s also pretty confusing. There’s all these abbreviations; VPS, Shared, Cloud, dedicated, semi-dedicated, and more. Why does it matter and what questions should you ask?

Why fast web hosting matters

We can all agree as Internet Users: we HATE to wait. If a site is slow, the amount of time we’re willing to continue to invest decreases exponentially with every second… every millisecond.

Kinds of web hosting

Let’s try and stay away from all the abbreviations and just group the types of hosting really fast web hosting providers offer in three categories and look at what these hosting types really are.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared Web Hosting is kind of like renting an apartment. You pay monthly for your site to exist on a given server, along with potentially hundreds of other users. It’s an affordable method, and your premium is often determined by the percentage of the server’s bandwidth you actually use. However, problems arise when one of your neighbors goes overboard and starts hogging your bandwidth, which isn’t unheard of.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting can be compared to buying your own property. You pay for the rights to an entire server, not to be shared with any other users. It gives you a lot more options on how to run your server and website: operating system, hardware, etc., but with great power, comes great responsibility. If something goes wrong, you’ll likely be fixing it yourself.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting

Semi-dedicated hosting is sort of a hybrid between dedicated and shared.  Basically, it’s a dedicated hosting box shared between just a few organizations.  What that means is customers on semi-dedicated hosting get the power of a dedicated web server but at a price that’s closer to shared hosting.  VPS, on the other hand, is neither shared nor dedicated.  It’s virtual.  Semi-dedicated hosting is the kind jHost provides our customers.