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After finishing your wonderful webpages, the next step would be to register for a domain name. And when you have that as well, you have to get those web pages hosted as a website in a public web server the internet recognizes. There are at least 5 different web hosting services available out there. Understanding each one can get you to use the right one that suits your budget and needs.

1. Self Hosting

This requires a large one-time expense as you would be getting your own server and putting it online with your own network provider. This is the option taken mostly by corporations and institutions that prefer to have confidentiality needs and tighter control of their own websites. You are solely responsible for maintaining the server and its network uptimes. There are web administration tools and content management software you will need to use in maintaining your site and updating its contents regularly. You will need a dedicated staff to do this and depending on the website you have, you may also need to have some form of server and network redundancy to guarantee better service uptimes.

2. Co-location Hosting

You can have your own web server or lease one co-located in a server farm provided by a third party hosting company. The service provider puts your server you into its network and takes responsibility for network availability and administration. You, however, remain in charge of maintaining your server.

3. Dedicated Managed Hosting

This option is preferred when the website requires high bandwidth and high storage for its content. You lease a server from a web hosting company that provides security, maintenance and administration to your server and internet connection. The service is often backed by server, network and hardware quality levels you agree with them. This is the most worry-free option in having a dedicated web server, though it comes with a price. The hosting company usually provides server uptime guarantees and hardware warranty.

4. Shared Web Hosting

This is the most prevalent hosting service. Your website is hosted on the same server as with other websites from various owners. You also share in the bandwidth allotted for that server with restrictions of bandwidth allocated to each website hosted in that server. Of course, your sites also are constrained by the storage space you have to share with others on that server. The hosting company provides the same services but you have the option to managed your own website or let them do it for you. This comes at very affordable rates because you and other webmasters share the cost of using the same server. Downside is that you also share the traffic of other websites. You also become vulnerable if other websites in the same server get hacked or the server goes down.

5. Virtual Private Server Hosting
This is relative new in the area of shared web hosting. It promises the advantages of affordability and those of a managed dedicated hosting. The server is logically partitioned so each partition is a virtual machine that behaves like a dedicated server where a webmaster is independent of the performance of other websites in that server.