Can you tell me which isle the Hosting is in?

Published in

Code a la Carte

2 min readMar 19, 2017

I must be hungry or just looking at too many food pics on social media. This post will attempt to explain web hosting using a grocery store example. Lets say you made an awesome new website depicting your new hobby, raising urban chickens. This has been your life long dream and you finally cataloged your process of raising these chickens and now you want to teach millions.

But how will everyone connect with your site. If you wanted to build a grocery store this would be the equivalent of looking for land to buy and start construction for your new store. So the land would be a server which would host your website and allow you to “open for business”.

You go online and check out buying a server. Never mind, you would have to sell your house and move into a tiny home.

Wait! You come across an article on “Web Hosting” and find out there are these companies with fast computers, servers, which you can basically rent space on for a fee. You guessed it, the more money you give them the better performance and/or space you will get. This is ideal for our Chicken website and will even be able to scale once you reach your first million readers!

These servers will allow for the storage of your files and other resources which will allow for maximum efficiencies for your website.

Before we conclude and start the chicken dance let’s go over a quick overview of the different types of hosting:

Shared:

Pros:Easy to manage and most affordable.

Cons:Fairly weak in terms of performance.

Dedicated:

Pros:Complete control and most powerful.

Cons:Very expensive.

VPS (Virtual Private Server):

Pros:Good amount of control, greater access to server space and power, fewer security issues.

Cons:Virtual machine instead of physical, limitations in terms of how many users.

Cloud:

Pros:Fewer issues handling large user sets (traffic), friendly to growing/scaling websites.

Cons:Plans and features can be vague and misleading.

Managed:

Pros:Hold-your-hand technical support,.

Cons:Lack of customization and flexibility.