Depending upon the popularity, size and type of sites, there are mainly three different types of hosting- shared, free and dedicated hosting. Take a closer look at these types.
For smaller ecommerce and normal websites, this is the best choice. This is just like leasing an office space and your site will be placed in a fast web server. A certain amount of space on the server will be dedicated for your website and you can give your own domain name for your home page. This is known as the shared hosting and the space dedicated for your website will be totally your own and there will not have any advertisements of other organizations or websites.
A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual server that the user perceives as a dedicated/private server even though it is installed on a physical computer running multiple operating systems. A single computer can have several VPSs, each one with its own operating system (OS) that runs the hosting software for a particular user. By choosing for VPS hosting, you get to select a configuration best suited for your apps, software requirements and overall internet marketing.
In this type, the webmaster wants to rent an entire server so that this server will be under the control of webmaster. Even the choice of hardware and operating systems well as the administration are also controlled by the webmaster. Also, there is no need for sharing this server with anyone else. So it is often called as dedicated server and it is more flexible when compared to shared and free hosting.
The hosting provides lots of features for its users. The domain name registration is the most important feature provided by them. It allows you to create your own domain name or web address. Also, it will provide disk storage space so that you can keep your audio files, graphics, html files and all other files which make up your website within that space. It will also support the CGI script and FTP access. Apart from these things, most of the hosting companies provide free data transfer for its users. Generally, it will be more than that the users needed. There will be a small charge for additional data usage. These are the main features of web hosting.