Virtual Servers vs. Virtual Hosting

Many of the low-cost hosting services use what is called Virtual Hosting (or sometimes Sub-hosting). Virtual Hosting is made possible by the introduction of HTTP/1.1 of the NCSA server, allowing multiple domains to be hosted under the same IP Address or virtual server. For example www.domain1.com and www.domain2.com would both point to the IP address 187.230.120.85. Many of the $10 to $50 per month hosting options fall under this category.

Unfortunately, there are serious limitations to this type of hosting:

1. The visitor's web browser must be HTTP/1.1 compliant (Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher and MSIE 3.0 or higher) in order to see your site. If the browser is not compliant, they will not see your site but instead point to the "root" domain, which is often the ISP's site.

2. Along the same lines, search engine spiders which are not HTTP/1.1 compliant will be unable to index your site.

3. The bandwidth is shared among all domains hosted on that virtual server, therefore you often see traffic limitations or surcharges placed on these type of accounts.

4. Often you have no or limited CGI-BIN access with a Virtual Hosting account, and no access to the server configuration files (which allow you to add MIME types and other neat tricks)

5. Support for SSL Digital Certificates will be either difficult or non-existent.

6. Probably no telnet access to the site (very handy for script debugging and chmod commands)

7. Limitations in e-mail capability as all domains point to the same IP Address. For instance if you send an e-mail to joe@domain1.com and joe@domain2.com, they will be seen as the same address interpreted as joe@187.230.120.85.

I should note here that most, but not all, web browsers are now HTTP/1.1 compliant - but there are still plenty of people with older machines running previous versions that it could be an issue.

For people wanting to have their domain hosted and are very budget-conscious, Virtual Hosting may be their best option. However, for those who are looking for a more powerful hosting environment the Virtual Server is the way to go:

• High traffic levels or unlimited traffic
• Full CGI-BIN access
• Ability to run Server-Side Includes
• Generally more storage space; 25-200 MB or more
• Telnet access
• Large or unlimited number of POP mailboxes
• Unlimited e-mail forwarding
• Access to the server config files (no more 404 File Not Found errors!)

Of course, these features come with a price: around $100-$200 per month, higher if you need more space or have intensive server processing requirements. The somewhat higher price is more than offset by the tremendous versatility and capability of the Virtual Server hosting environment.

Browse Hosting Plans

Home Private/Dedicated Co-Located Shared/Virtual Unix/Linux Windows Budget (<$10) Free Search Articles Contact Privacy Policy Add to Favorites

Did You Know?

Keep your web host from costing you money Now that you've probably just spent hundreds of hours and possibly even thousands of dollars to build your web presence, one of the most important decisions you'll make next is where to host your website. Choosing a Platform It may be true that Unix tends to be more reliable than NT, but it is even more true that any server when overloaded with sometimes 250+ web sites, like most web hosting companies do, will not be as stable as you need it to be. Don't expect your site to incur 100% availability if you are on a shared virtual server. There are too many things that can go wrong when 250 different sites are competing for the same resources. If your web host doesn't publish how many sites they put on a single server, find out from them, they shouldn't have anything to hide. By the way, 255 sites is the maximum that Windows NT will allow per server, and most web hosts take full advantage of that for their lower end solutions. Web sites running on NT/Windows 2000: *Rapid application development with scripting languages such as ASP or Cold Fusion. *Typically is easier to administer in a shared hosting environment. *If need ODBC to support database driven a site. *FrontPage tends to work better on NT More...