Outside of all the application specific or high end server deployments, you tend to have two options when considering your hosting plan. Do you go for a personal or home user type account or do you go for something business or corporate optimised? Typically, it depends on your real world setup and the type of site you’re operating. Sometimes a personal hosting plan might suit your needs to a tee and sometimes you might require a business hosting account even if you don’t technically run, a “business”. So what are the differences and which do you actually need? That is what we’re going to address today.

Below we’ve outlined what exactly is a personal or home user hosting account and also what makes up a business hosting account. The differences might seem insignificant if you’re not clued up about web hosting and the options available to you but I can assure you they’re significant when it comes to the success of your project.

Personal Hosting

Personal hosting tends to be typically shared hosting meaning you share the resources of the server with other accounts. As a result of this, personal hosting accounts tend to be extremely cheap which makes them ideal for home based websites, fan sites, personal blogs or hobby type sites. The resources at your disposal for each account tend to be more than enough to host sites of this nature and can allow you to receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of daily visitors with little to no performance related issues. If you’re a first time user, hosting accounts of this nature are ideal and should you require more resources in future you can always upgrade to a higher end package.

Business Hosting

Business hosting or corporate hosting tends to be a little bit different. You’ll find that each account is geared more towards businesses and companies with higher resources available in terms of cpu, ram and disk space but often more detailed features such as daily backups, detailed analytics and web statistics – all the stuff you’d need if you were running an online business. Business hosting can pretty much be used for any business, online or offline and in fact it can also be used for personal websites too should you be running something particularly high traffic that demands a lot of resources. With either option, the key is to match your requirements specifically with the package on offer be it personal hosting, business hosting or a fully blown private server solution.

Optimisation

We’ll touch on resource usage below but first let’s address optimisation. Typically, as business hosting accounts tend to host more resource intensive, higher traffic websites. They’ll also need to be configured with a certain amount of optimisation in mind. It’s not just a case of adding more memory, disk space or processing power to make a site run faster. A high traffic website that is running sluggish can be optimised without the need for additional hardware. Small changes to databases, software configuration or the file system can all result in the resolution of any performance related issue and typically business hosting packages come with such optimisation in place from the outset.

Resources

When it comes to different hosting accounts, most of the changes between plans are centered around available resources. In theory, small personal websites don’t take up as much space, they don’t use as much bandwidth and they don’t ultilise as much memory and processing power as a high volume business website. This is why when you compare a typical shared hosting plan to a business hosting service you’ll see that the figures concerning resources differ massively. This also leads to a price increase between plans so with that in mind, whether your website is business or personal it’s important to know from the outset what sort of resources you’re going to be requiring. If not, you’ll either end up overpaying or running out of a particular resource.

Crossover

As noted above, there is a fair bit of cross over between packages. As you can see it typically depends on resource usage/requirements and also integrated features. However, you could run a site from your bedroom, be classed as a home/personal user but your site be that resource intensive that simple personal shared hosting plans don’t cut it. Likewise, you could want to setup a site for your corporate entity that is so simple and so low volume it makes little sense overpaying for resources you simply don’t need. So you need to consider the options.

Options

HostPresto offer lots of hosting options which cater for every site type, all traffic volumes and virtually any organisation. Whether you’re running a small time hobby site or you’re hosting one of the highest traffic sites on the web, we can provide a solution. We offer regular shared hosting types which can be used for any purpose through to virtual private servers and even bespoke custom deployments.

If you’re unsure as to which hosting type you need, just get in touch with us and we’ll be more than happy to recommend a plan or service suitable for hosting your website.