As the number of Web pages grows to trillions of pages on the Internet, Webmasters have too many hosting plans to choose from - affordable web hosting, Cheap Web hosting, ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting With Templates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Windows Hosting and Co-location Hosting.

Those commonly used web hosting terms represent the many faces of web hosting. All web hosting plans and terminologies can be classified in terms of cost, programming languages, operation systems, Web servers and functionality.

Cost - Web hosting plans are referred as affordable web hosting, budget hosting and cheap web hosting. Cost of web hosting is the first thing that many small site owners are looking for. Affordable web hosting, budget hosting or cheap web hosting plan often cost less than $5 per month.

Programming Languages - If you want to add dynamics and interactivity to your websites and you happen to know something about programming, you want to hosting plans that support the programming languages that you know well or want to master. The commonly used wen development languages include PHP, ASP, JSP and PERL. The hosting plans that support those programming languages are referred as PHP Web hosting, ASP Web hosting, JSP Web hosting or PERL Web hosting.

Operating Systems - Once you've picked up the programming language(s) for your Web development, you still have freedom to choose the operating system that hosts your Websites. Besides ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, other programming languages, PHP, JSP and PERL, work on Windows, Unix and Linux. Hosting plans that support particular operating systems are referred as Window Hosting, Unix Hosting or Linux hosting.

Servers - Apache is the most widely supported Web server in Web hosting industry. ASP works only on Mirosoft Internet Information Server or IIS server. Weblogic or Websphere is needed for JSP hosting. When webmasters are talking about Web servers, they're most interested in the server performance - Managed Web Hosting, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Shared hosting is the cheapest plan, and you can host as many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs around $50 a month, and Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50 - $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth of the hosting plan.

Functionality - There're hosting plans out there that either make the site creation easier or offer support for secure online transactions. A simple website can be easily created in hours if you choose hosting plans that support various templates. Ecommerce hosting plan is the choice for sites that provide shopping carts and accept payment online.

Copyright @2005, Bruce Zhang

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