Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting is basically when a company takes a portion of one of their servers' space and sets it aside for your account. You share that server with various other accounts with that company, thus it is called Shared Hosting. Any low-cost hosting plan is a Shared Hosting plan, since it is cheaper to just give someone a bit of space to work with and not worry about dedicating anything to them. Shared Hosting is the ideal way to go for someone who isn't extremely serious about their plans for web development. If all you want to do is have a small, personal site, a company's Shared Hosting plans should be more than enough to meet your needs. The space you get and allocated bandwidth are usually not great, but if you aren't going to host a lot of large files and do not expect a large volume of traffic, you will be fine.
Different companies offer different types of packages with their shared hosting plans. It is important to understand what you will be getting in full before you sign up with a web host, especially if it cost you money.
The lowest tier of plans comes from free hosts. These provide the perfect way to get started and allow you to fool around and test your ability to throw together a website without costing you anything. Do keep in mind that you tend to get the bare minimum with these plans, though. Space can range anywhere from 15 to 300MB of space only. They also only allow for limited traffic before they shut down access to the site for the rest of that month. Another common thing seen is that the company will place tons of their ads onto your site. The last problem is that they typically do not support more than the bare minimum of HTML support. You cannot use PHP, ASP, CGI, or any other type of server-side languages.
Of all free web hosting services I've heard about, I'd have to say that the most promising looks to be Freezoka. Since I'm at a point where free hosting no longer cuts it for me, I haven't had the chance to personally try it, but if their claims are true, it sounds like the best I've seen. It actually gives support to PHP and offers you mySQL databases.
One thing you won't be able to obtain for free is a domain name, and that is the problem with going with a free host. If you want your own dot com, you'll need to pay for it. A free host will offer you some sort of sub domain (i.e. yourname.theirsite.com), but you won't get your own domain that way. Luckily, there are plenty of web hosts that will give you a free domain name within their web hosting package. Now, while it's possible to get a domain name for a mere $10 a year and only have to worry about those fees if your hosting was free, I think that paying $4 or so a month for hosting is worth it with the domain name included. This is mainly because the hosting you get will be better than otherwise.
Now, I've seen a lot of hosts and their packages and it's hard to figure out which one gives you the best value and suits all of your needs for the lowest cost. I've recently found the solution to this, however. What if I said that you didn't have to go and weigh various options and weed through all types of packages and plans? Wouldn't it be better to not have to find out what tier you need, but just get the best Shared Hosting service as your base plan? Well, that's exactly what I found with Lunar Pages.
Lunar Pages has a "Personal Website" package that actually gives you unlimited space and bandwidth. That eliminates any need to figure out how much space you need. Just get as much as you want for their base price. And it's not that expensive either. After seeing this offer, I realized that there was no reason to really use any of the other hosts I had in the past. I'd never have to worry about nearing some limitation and having to upgrade my package or risk being hit with overage charges. There are no limits, so I'm free to add as much as I want to the site. It makes web hosting very simple.
Dedicated Servers
The other type of service you can obtain from a web host is a Dedicated Server. In this arrangement, you actually rent (or own) the entire machine on which your site is hosted. You pay for the PC and all its hardware, making sure its capabilities and available space are to your liking. You will only have your own files on the machine, no one else's. You also are usually entitled to have whatever software you wish installed onto the server machine. With some hosts, you are even allowed to remotely access the computer to use it as if it were your own.
Just about any host that offers a Shared Hosting plan will also have plans that allow you to purchase Dedicated Servers. These are significantly more expensive than the Shared Hosting plans, as you are paying for the machine itself. However, if you want to have a serious business with all of your files kept personal and secure, it is almost a requirement that you have your own, dedicated server.
