‘What type of hosting should I get?’  I’ve had this question asked of me several times by other entrepreneurs, I thought I’d cover the Pros and Cons of each of the different types that you can get.  Hopefully it will help you decide what the best approach is for your startup.

dedicated server – this is what you traditionally expect with hosting.  a service provider allocates you physical hardware in their data center that is dedicated to your website, and your website alone.  Pros:  You can do whatever you want on that machine, because you are leasing it.  Cons:  If you get a sudden burst of traffic because you got on the Digg homepage, you’ll most likely crash the server.  Also, you need to have someone highly technical to administer the machine.

a cloud server – a cloud server is a virtual server that runs on a shared massive computing infrastructure – such as the Amazon EC2 setup, or the Rackspace Cloud Server setup.  Pros:  They are in essence, dedicated servers, so you can do whatever you want on each of the virtual servers.  If you know what you’re doing, you can typically startup new machines to handle unexpected load/traffic.  Cons:  You’ll need an even more technical person to understand how to create virtual machines and administer them.

shared hosting – shared hosting is a setup where you and several other clients of the hosting company share a dedicated/cloud server.  Pros:  All administration should be handled by the service provider, including email setup, security, and website setup (but not maintenance).  Cons:  You don’t have admin access and you can’t install anything you may need on the server itself.  Sometimes you may not even have access to the machine, except through FTP.

shared cloud hosting - shared cloud hosting is similar to shared hosting, except that everything is stored on an administered cloud infrastructure.  Examples of this type of service are: Rackspace cloud sites, Microsoft Azure, and Google Apps.  Pros:  All administration is handled by the service provider.  Generally if your site gets slammed with traffic, the shared cloud site can handle all the additional traffic.  Cons:  No control of the environment that you’re in.  If you have a highly customized server that requires add-ons that aren’t in a standard package, then you probably need to go with a cloud server or dedicated server.

Ok, hope this helps.  If you have any questions of thoughts shoot me an email.